by grabthar's hammer, you'd think the damned suits would learn.

blade runner is, among my crowd at least, probably the most famous victim of Executive Meddling... the voice-over and fake ending being screwups so universally loathed that any sane person would have reason to expect a certain degree of circumspection on future projects of similar scope and genre.

oh, but no. according to tvtropes (quickly becoming a house-favorite website), one of the things that always bugged me about the matrix turns out not to have been a wachowski fumble at all, but yet another instance of the stupid beancounters apparently believing that the real audience for the work would be just as stupid as them:

In The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers had wanted to have the machines use the humans plugged into the Matrix as a gigantic neural network computer. However, executives thought that the audience wouldn't understand this, so they changed it to using the humans to generate electricity, even though this violates the laws of thermodynamics and creates several plot holes.