You take the blue pill, the story ends. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland. You cast Laurence Fishburne, you get a memorable performance. You bail on Laurence Fishburne, you get, well, The Matrix Resurrections.
Laurence Fishburne’s character, Morpheus, was killed off in The Matrix Online, a MMORPG released in 2005, and thus was not included in Resurrections, which came out last year. In 2020, he admitted, “I have not been invited…I wish them well. I hope it’s great.” Well, that wasn’t necessarily the case.
At the premiere of Fishburne’s latest, Netflix’s The School for Good and Evil, the actor shared his thoughts on the movie he was intentionally left out of, and like the consensus itself, Laurence Fishburne is somewhere in the middle with his Matrix Resurrections critique. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. And it wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be.” Still, he has no regrets about not being in the fourth installment of The Matrix franchise.
The character of Morpheus was reimagined completely, being portrayed by the much younger Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Agent Smith also got a complete tinkering, with Hugo Weaving being replaced by Jonathan Groff.
Despite being excised from The Matrix Resurrections, Laurence Fishburne still had praise for his co-stars, saying, “I thought Carrie-Anne and Keanu really did their thing.” Indeed, Fishburne is still tight with Keanu Reeves, appearing in the second, third and upcoming fourth installments of the John Wick series, playing crime boss The Bowery King.
While Resurrections was a box office dud, it was at least a vast improvement over 2003’s initial trilogy capper, The Matrix Revolutions. And if we have to put ourselves in a blue pill/red pill scenario, we’ll definitely take Resurrections.
What do you think? Would including Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix Resurrections have been a better decision overall?