Matrix 5: Everything we know about a possible Wachowski sequel

Will Neo and Trinity return for Matrix 5? And 6? Here's everything we know (or think we know) about a Resurrections follow-up.

Warning! Spoilers for The Matrix Resurrections are below.

Will there be a Matrix 5 (and 6)?

Survey says... no answer! Let’s get this out of the way right now, just because we got a fourth Matrix movie doesn’t mean any more sequels are confirmed. Neither Warner Bros. nor writer/director Lana Wachowski has said anything to suggest Matrix 5 is on the way — let alone an entire new trilogy.

Then again, they haven’t said it won’t happen either. Depending on how The Matrix Resurrections performs (both at the box office and on HBO Max), it’s possible Warner could greenlight more movies.

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But getting Lana Wachowski back might prove more difficult. The director (one-half of the team behind the original trilogy) has made it clear she made The Matrix Resurrections for very personal reasons. So convincing her to make Matrix 5 won’t be as easy as writing a check.

“It wasn’t planned,” Wachowski told IGN at the movie’s premiere. “It was not orchestrated in any way. Something happened in my life and I needed to process and grieve. And I really kind of needed to have all these people around who knew my parents.”

“Something happened in my life and I needed to process and grieve.”

The director further clarified her statements in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter:

“When mom and dad passed, I went to [Lilly Wachowski] and said, ‘Look, this idea came to me. I can see that it’s about me working with my grief, and I was thinking, do you want to work on it together?’ ... That’s what grief does. Grief spirals us off in different directions, and you can see that there’s a lot of mom and dad in [Lilly Wachoswki’s TV series] Work in Progress. She’s doing something similar, but not the same. I wanted to go back and feel this thing again, and she wanted to go off and do this other thing.”

In other words, The Matrix Resurrections is a deeply personal movie — not the backdoor to a cash-grabbing trilogy. That said, Lana Wachowski hasn’t ruled another sequel out either. So at least there’s hope.

When could Matrix 5 hit theaters?

If a deal does happen and production starts immediately, we might be seeing Matrix 5 in theaters in roughly two years, at the earliest.

That said, if — through some incredible twist of fate — Warner and Wachowski agree to make an entire new trilogy, the wait between Matrix 5 and Matrix 6 may not be very long. Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions filmed back to back and released within six months of each other. We could see the same thing happen again with this new trilogy.

What is the plot of Matrix 5?

Well, assuming the movie happens, anything seems possible. However, the ending of Resurrections does set up some possible paths forward.

The movie ends with Neo and Trinity reuniting to defeat the Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris), an evil AI who resurrected them after Revolutions and used their love to power his new and more brutal Matrix. Thanks to an assist from Agent Smith (reskinned as Jonathan Groff), Neo and Trinity are able to take control of this new Matrix. The movie ends with them vowing to reshape it into a better world.

It’s a happy ending, but will it last? As Resurrections reveals, the peace that Neo brokered between people and machines in the original trilogy only lasted until the robots ran out of power. Now, with their new power source gone, it’s likely only a matter of time until the robots come up with a new plan to subjugate humankind. We could even see a full-on Sentinel invasion of IO, the new free-human city in Resurrections governed by Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith), where humans, robots, and programs live in harmony.

Smith is also seemingly on the loose at the end of Resurrections. Will he return in Matrix 5? And if so, will he be a villain or an ally?

Could The Matrix 5 be a video game?

The Wachowskis are famously video game fans. They worked directly on the Reloaded tie-in title Enter the Matrix along with The Matrix Online, an online multiplayer game released as a sequel to Revolutions. Meanwhile, Epic Games just released The Matrix Awakens, an interactive demo designed to show off the potential of the company’s new Unreal 5 game engine.

When asked by IGN if she’d consider making a new video game, Lana Wachowski replied enthusiastically, “Unreal Engine is there!” She went on to clarify that it depends more on the people involved than the technology and money available to her. “If the right people came and said let’s do something together I’d probably say hell yes, but I do things for people.”

“Unreal Engine is there!”

A sequel to The Matrix Resurrections in video game form also makes a lot of sense given the movie’s premise. The film opens with Neo back in the Matrix where he’s been conditioned to believe he’s an award-winning video game developer behind the groundbreaking Matrix trilogy of games while working on a delayed new title called Binary.

What if instead of a regular sequel, Wachowski just released Binary to the real world? In the Matrix, weirder things have happened.

The Matrix Resurrections is out now in theaters and HBO Max.