In a move seemingly designed to provoke the maximum amount of despair from everyone who had pretend bullet time gunfights back in 1999, Warner Bros is apparently moving ahead with a reboot of The Matrix.
THR reports that the studio is in the early stages of putting together a new take on the seminal blockbuster, but that the Wachowskis are not involved at present. Genre veteran Zak Penn (X-Men: The Last Stand, The Avengers, Elektra, Ready Player One) has been given the task of taking the first run a treatment, and that’s basically all the information there is at the moment.
The site notes that there “there is potential interest in Michael B. Jordan to star,” but that should of course be taken with a giant pinch of salt given how early this is.
They also note that Warner Bros would be much more interested in getting the Wachowskis’ blessing than getting producer Joel Silver involved, despite the fact that Silver has been pitching a return to The Matrix universe for some time. This is because of the producer’s somewhat notorious “budget control issues” and the fact that he “apparently has a strained relationship with the Wachowskis.” And, presumably, because the Wachowskis created the damn thing in the first place.
Obviously there’s a huge amount that remains to be seen. It will be interesting to see if the Wachowskis can be convinced to return in any capacity, but it’s hard to approach this with anything other than “Really? The Matrix? But why?”
In case you’ve somehow never seen the original film, it starred Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano and Hugo Weaving, and “sees humanity living in a simulated reality, unaware that humans are in pods in which their bodies are being harvested for energy. A computer programmer named Neo (Keanu Reeves) slowly becomes aware of this suppressed existence, eventually becoming humanity’s one true hope (Neo = One) to overthrow the oppressors.”
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