The Matrix

Having apparently missed the franchise’s various messages about futile cycles, unproductive patterns, and humanity’s soul-destroying tendency to keep doing the thing that sort of worked in the past, Warner Bros. has put plans to reboot The Matrix into motion. That’s per The Hollywood Reporter, which says that the studio has tapped X-Men and Avengers writer Zak Penn to write a script for a new Matrix film.


The Reporter notes that there are some executives at Warner who view The Matrix—the 1999 film that single-handedly changed the visual vocabulary of modern action movies, briefly threatened to lead a plucky Resistance of smart, visually dynamic sci-fi back into theaters, and gave asshole online conspiracy theorists new slang to describe their “self-aware” bullshit—as “sacrosanct.” But those folks are getting easily steamrolled by a monolithic, mechanistic force, one that knows that nothing gets butts in seats like a movie title people already know and like. (Or one-third like, and two-thirds tolerate, at least.)

Obviously, the key factors in whether these plans actually get anywhere are original writers and directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski, currently busy working on their Netflix series Sense8. Series star Keanu Reeves has made it clear he’d only come back if the duo was involved, recently telling reporters, “They would have to write it and direct it. And then we’d see what the story is, but yeah, I dunno. That’d be weird, but why not?” At the very least, Warner Bros. would at least need to secure some sort of blessing from the sibling pair. Meanwhile, the studio is apparently interested in getting Creed star Michael B. Jordan to step in as the nascent reboot’s star.