After going out of their way to deny the leaks and rumors to claim that the fourth installment in The Matrix franchise still hasn’t settled on an official title, the moniker was officially revealed to be… Resurrections, just as had been reported as far back as the beginning of the year. While the misdirection didn’t work, the description of the first footage certainly generated more than a few questions.
Keanu Reeves’ Neo apparently doesn’t remember a thing that unfolded across the previous trilogy, which he experiences as vivid dreams and hallucinations as opposed to events he’s lived through. However, he’s offered the red pill again, and we can all gather how things are going to go from there. There’s less than four months to go until The Matrix Resurrections comes to theaters and HBO Max, so we should be expecting the CinemaCon promo to be made available online in the not too distant future.
Another curious aspect of the movie is that it marks the first time Lana Wachowski is directing a feature film solo, and in a new interview Lilly revealed why she wasn’t keen on the idea of stepping back behind the camera for a lengthy, action-heavy, effects-driven and extremely complicated production.
“I got out of my transition and was just completely exhausted because we had made Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending, and the first season of Sense8 back-to-back-to-back. We were posting one, and prepping the other at the exact same time. So you’re talking about three 100-plus days of shooting for each project, and so, coming out and just being completely exhausted, my world was like, falling apart to some extent even while I was like, you know, cracking out of my egg. So I needed this time away from this industry. I needed to reconnect with myself as an artist and I did that by going back to school and painting and stuff.”
Lucky that Lilly didn’t decide to come back for The Matrix Resurrections, because the exhaustion would have been ten times worse when the effects of the pandemic saw production halted, restarted and then continued with the COVID-19 health and safety protocols in place. The hype for the latest chapter in Neo’s story is starting to build, but fans were burned twice before with Reloaded and Revolutions, so the sequel eighteen years in the making has a lot of work to do in order to win over the skeptics.