The “Matrix” franchise has been sitting in an odd place for a while now—too iconic to leave alone, too loaded to revive casually. So the most revealing part of Drew Goddard’s latest update on “Matrix 5” isn’t a tease about lore or a wink about legacy characters. It’s the caution.
Asked about the sequel, Goddard kept the focus on the script and nothing else. “I can’t say too much, because we’re still in the stage of writing it,” he explained to Variety. “I need to give myself space to find the best story. I think the approach will be the way I approach anything, which is, do I love it? And I love what Lana and Lilly Wachowski did with those movies. They mean so much to me, and I feel like they’ve had a profound impact on my creative voice. I take this responsibility very seriously. I feel the weight of wanting to do right by the fans, wanting to do right by the creators, and wanting to do right for myself as a fan.”
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When the obvious question came—whether Keanu Reeves and the original cast return—Goddard didn’t elaborate. “I can’t speak to that.” That still leaves the biggest piece of the story unresolved, and it matches where the film appears to be right now: still in development, still being written, and still nowhere near a point where the studio is publicly locking cast in place. Warner announced the project in April 2024, saying Goddard would write and direct while Wachowski would remain involved as an executive producer.
Goddard also pushed back a little on the idea that the last film failed to connect. Asked why “The Matrix Resurrections” didn’t land as strongly at the box office, he said, “I don’t know. It certainly resonated with me. When I watched the movie, I was deeply moved. It may be the most emotional of the of the four. I know it got caught up in the COVID times, and it was when Warner Bros. was putting everything on streaming.” The 2021 film did, in fact, open during Warner’s day-and-date HBO Max strategy and grossed about $159 million worldwide against a reported $190 million budget.
For now, that’s the real state of “Matrix 5”—not a movie ready to answer its biggest questions, but one still being shaped by the burden of what came before. Goddard isn’t promising a return, a reset, or a shortcut back into the machine. He’s saying the story has to earn its way there first. For a franchise this mythic and this easy to cheapen, that may be the only sensible place to begin.
