Studio IP ownership coerced Wachowski into making a sequel she opposed

Evidence

In 2021, a new installment in the Matrix franchise was released to comment on our contemporary branded dystopia. The very existence of the film is emblematic of the topic at hand. In The Matrix Resurrections, Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) is heavily medicated, haunted, and back in the machine-run simulation, this time a soulless San Francisco as represented by tech bros and austere coffee shops. He has developed a video game trilogy based on his fuzzy memories of the events in the first three films. “The market’s tough. I’m sure you can understand why our beloved parent company Warner Bros. has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy,” says Anderson’s business partner, Smith, who in the original trilogy was a straight-jawed corporate suit, one among many. In the new film, he’s a GQ finance bro: blazer over a t-shirt, Wayfarers, and shoes without socks. “They informed me they’re going to do it with or without us,” he continues. “I thought they couldn’t do that,” Anderson replies, replicating the actual backstory of the film. The Wachowskis had been opposed to extending the original trilogy, but Warner Bros. owns the intellectual property and, having repeatedly asked the Wachowskis to no avail, announced their intention to move forward with a new writer in 2017. Softly extorted into maintaining her vision of the property, Lana Wachowski relented, writing the extortion into the script. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 440

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s finance-to-form thesis: corporate ownership of IP forced the sequel’s very existence, and its aesthetic (the meta-commentary about corporate sequels becomes the film’s content).
• QUESTION: Worth verifying the claim that Warner Bros announced intent to proceed in 2017 regardless of Wachowski — a causal claim about studio leverage over creators.