Can Drew Goddard Unlock The Matrix’s Mindfuck Potential?

When director Lana Wachowski returned to the world of The Matrix for 2021’s The Matrix Resurrections, she did so with a cheeky, post-modern awareness of the cultural forces that led her to that point. The film begins with Neo (Keanu Reeves) now fully re-embedded into the Matrix as a video game designer named Thomas Anderson, whose trilogy of video games entitled The Matrix is being revived once again for a new installment. As Thomas’s “business partner” (Jonathan Groff) says:

“I know you said the story was over for you, but that’s the thing about stories. They never really end, do they? We’re still telling the same stories we’ve always told, just with different names, different faces and I have to say I’m kind of excited.”

Groff’s character turns out to be a reincarnation of Agent Smith, but that doesn’t make his point any less valid — or the film any less fun: At the end of Resurrections, Neo has escaped his digital prison, reunited with his true love Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), and the two of them are off to “remind people what a free mind can do.”

It’s the happy ending denied both characters by the end of Revolutions, and a totally reasonable place to let the franchise lie. That is not, of course, the way things work in a 21st century where IP is God. Thus, enter Drew Goddard, who Warner Bros. just announced will be writing and directing a new Matrix film, based on “a new idea that we all believe would be an incredible way to continue the Matrix world,” Warner Bros. Motion Pictures president of production Jesse Ehrman said in a statement. Lana and Lilly Wachowski will not be involved.

The instinctive, knee-jerk reaction to this news might understandably be a hearty nope… except that Goddard may truly be the right guy for this job. I write this as a decades-long Matrix fan (as discussed last week, when Jonah Krueger and I reflected on the original film’s 25th anniversary), and even with any/all plot details under wraps, Goddard’s past body of work speaks pretty loudly about the potential here.

Really, his resume is a fascinating one, beginning with his arrival on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer writing staff in 2002, delivering several of the final season’s best scripts before moving onto write for Angel and Lost. (Buffy was a show that trained its fans to pay attention to the credited writer of the episode, which meant that when he made his debut with “Conversations With Dead People,” co-written by Jane Espenson, he was an instant star in certain circles.)