Relentless Zak Penn Won’t Leave Party Until Warner Bros. Lets Him Reboot THE MATRIX
Zak Penn - who co-scripted Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One adaptation with the book's author, Ernest Cline (RIP your mentions, homie) - is making the rounds promoting that movie and, apparently, still prone to making terrorist threats involving The Matrix.
In a recent interview with Screen Rant, Penn said that he's been "harassing" Warner Bros. - who, in fairness, have been floating the idea of a Matrix remake for a long while now (at one point with Michael B. Jordan involved) - trying to get anything going regarding a revisit to that series' artificial reality:
"I’ve been working on The Matrix right now. Which is in…a phase right now. That’s a franchise I desperately want to see brought back and, I can’t go in to too much detail, but I’ve been harassing Warner Bros. for years to try to get it going again so that’s one thing I’m working on and I’ve been working on a bunch of other things too.”
Now, this might not be the worst idea ever if the Wachowski Sisters were still involved. But according to this Hollywood Reporter article from, oh, roughly a year ago:
"At this point, the Wachowski siblings, who wrote and directed the original and its two sequels, are not involved and the nature of their potential engagement with a new version has not been determined. Certainly, Warners would want the two filmmakers to give at minimum a blessing to the nascent project. The studio had no comment."
Around the same time, you might remember that Penn slid into all our DMs on Twitter and clarified that his take on The Matrix really isn't a "reboot":
"All I can say at this point is no one could or should REBOOT the Matrix. People who know Animatrix and the comics understand. Can't comment yet except to say that the words "reboot" and "remake" were from an article. Let's stop responding to inaccurate news."
He went even more aggro in that same Tweet thread:
"Do I want to see more stories set in the universe of the Matrix? Yes. Because it's a brilliant idea that generates great stories."
Go home, bro. You're drunk. You want to bring the universe back and set more stories in it? That's a "reboot", son.
Either way, the fact that WB isn't ready to get on the dance floor with Penn quite yet is comforting. Even though the two sequels were flawed (but still engaging in their own right), this is a franchise that belongs to very particular vision (that, honestly, shouldn't be adapted by a straight white dude). Let's keep it that way.
