The sequel brought back all your favorites from the original: Neo (Keanu Reeves), the prototypical everyman who discovers he’s destined for greatness Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), the fearless warrior who falls in love with him Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), the badass leader of the rebellion who’s a mentor to our hero and Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), the snide villain determined to snuff out this uprising.Īs is normal for a follow-up to a blockbuster, The Matrix Reloaded was bigger and more ambitious, boasting a wider scope and fleshing out the world of the Matrix, the virtual-reality simulation in which artificial intelligence has enslaved humanity. This week, we celebrate The Matrix Reloaded, which hit multiplexes on May 15, 2003, helping to cement this franchise as one of the most iconic modern film trilogies. Audiences craved a sequel, and four years later, they’d get their wish. You know the rest: Eventually, Lana and Lilly got to make The Matrix, which was 1999’s most innovative and thrilling sci-fi/action film. “But then said, ‘And we want to direct it.’ That was going to be tough,” since they had never directed a feature before. “The minute I started reading the script for The Matrix, I wanted to see it,” the producer later recalled. Unfortunately, that movie, which starred Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, and Julianne Moore, turned out to be a disaster. But the Wachowskis and Silver hit it off, and he was excited to check out any other screenplays they might have written. It was the mid-1990s, and a talented pair of aspiring filmmakers, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, were working with the high-powered action producer Joel Silver on Assassins, their first big project.
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Welcome to This Week in Genre History, where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world’s greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.