By Travis Johnson
Everything old is new again – a maxim we could start every third news item with these days. According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Matrix is the latest property being considered for a reboot.
Created by the Wachowski sisters and produced by action movie veteran Joel Silver, 1999’s The Matrix, as we’re sure you’ll remember, starred Keanu Reeves as a young hacker who gets drawn into a war against malevolent machines that spans both the real and virtual worlds (spoiler: he ain’t in the one he thinks he is). The film codified a lot of cyberpunk tropes for cinema, heralded a thankfully brief love affair with bullet time, and kicked off a franchise encompassing one and a half good films spread across three feature films, one anthology film, a number of frustrating video games, and a few online comics.
Until now! Writer Zak Penn (X-Men: The Last Stand, The Avengers) is reportedly in talks to, ahem, pen a new movie, one that might possibly take on board the very now “expanded universe” concept by mining story potential from the wider world of The Matrix instead of doing a straight sequel. The possibility of a Morpheus-focused prequel has been mooted, and Michael B. Jordan’s name has been bandied around, as it has around every other major project currently in development.
Hmm. We’re not against it. The Matrix never quite live up to its potential as a multimedia franchise even though it gave it a red-hot go, and the wider universe implied if not depicted in the stuff we did get is certainly a rich playing field that should prove fertile ground for any number of other creators – one of the best spin-offs so far is Neil Gaiman and Bill Sienkiewicz’s “Goliath”, for example.
As for The One himself, Keanu Reeves has said he’s not averse to a return to the green and black universe of The Matrix, although his involvement is predicated on Wachowski Starship being involved. “They would have to write it and direct it,” he told Yahoo Movies.
All else aside, any further instalments couldn’t possibly be worse than Matrix Revolutions, right?
