In the latest Screen Rant Pitch Meeting, Ryan George takes us back to the original pitch for The Matrix, a movie where Keanu Reeves wears a lot of leather and also sits naked and bald in a bathtub full of goo. Directed by the Wachowskis and released in 1999, The Matrix was a smash success that grossed over $463 million at the worldwide box office and blew audiences' minds with its wild concept and "bullet time" action sequences.
The Matrix will soon be celebrating its 20th anniversary... which is usually around the time that the nostalgia cycle kicks in and demands a sequel, reboot, or remake. Sure enough, Warner Bros. did seem to be making moves towards rebooting The Matrix (no pun intended) a couple of years ago, potentially with a prequel movie about a young Morpheus. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your outlook, all seems to have gone quiet on that front.
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No matter what happens with the future of the Matrix franchise, we'll still have the original movie - complete with its bowls of snot, virtual kung fu lessons, gravity-defying fight scenes, and the slaughter of countless innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Let's go back in time to the '90s, to find out how the original pitch meeting for The Matrix (probably) went down.
Of course, with the prevalence of the internet people no longer need to be forcibly enslaved by machines in order to spend the entire day wandering around a virtual dream world designed to distract them. On an entirely unrelated note, there are now more than 100 Screen Rant Pitch Meetings available for you to watch on YouTube!
The Matrix was succeeded by two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, which were filmed back-to-back and released just six months apart in 2003. Unfortunately the highly-anticipated follow-ups proved to be disappointing for most fans. There was also an animated anthology film, The Animatrix, released in between the two live-action sequels, and a video game called Enter the Matrix that was released at the same time as The Matrix Reloaded. Yes, 2003 definitely had a serious case of Matrix Fever.
The Wachowskis have since continued to make sci-fi movies like Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending, and more recently created the short-lived Netflix sci-fi series Sense8. Whether they'll decide to return to the Matrix franchise, or whether the franchise itself will ever be successfully rebooted, remains to be seen.