Morpheus isn’t in Matrix Resurrections due to a weird Matrix video game

Resurrections by The Matrix“The first installment in the sci-fi action thriller series in more than 12 years has set the internet ablaze like a raging swarm. Keanu Reynolds and Carrie-Anne Moss will reprise their roles as Neo and Trinity. They are joined by original trio supporting players Jada pinkett Smith and Lambert Wilson. Also, newcomers Yahya Abul-Mateen II, Neil Patrick Harris, and others. But of all the new and old faces seen in the first look at the upcoming film, one iconic character is conspicuously absent: Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus.

We’ve known since the initial cast announcements dating back as far as 2019 that Fishburne, responsible for playing Neo’s stoic, mirror-shades-and-katana-touting mentor, wasn’t returning for the fourth Matrix outing alongside Reeves and Moss. “I am not in the next Matrix movie,” Fishburne told Collider in a recent interview. “[Y]ou’d have to ask Lana Wachowski why, because I don’t have an answer for that.” Which raises the question: What happened to Morpheus before the events of Resurrections by The Matrix?

You may find the solution in the oddest of places. The Matrix OnlineMMO, now in decline. This was the Matrix spinoff that was launched back in 2005.

Monolith Productions/Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Where? The Matrix RevolutionsInterviews revealed that Wachowskis did not intend to release another installment of the series after the original debuted in 2003. Instead, the plan was to pass the reins of the series’ storyline to the audience itself by way of The Matrix Online. In the MMO, players assumed the role of a newly awakened “redpill” who chooses from one of several factions formed between the humans and machines in the wake of the events of the third film. It allowed players to interact with several characters from the film trilogy: the Oracle (Mary Alice), Seraph(Collin Chou) and, ultimately, Morpheus.

“Our films were never intended for a passive audience,” said the Wachowskis in a 2005 interview with IGN. “We wanted our audience to have to work, to have to think, to have to actually participate in order to enjoy them. [T]It is no secret that three Matrix movies are among the most popular adult films of all time. […]This suggests the existence of others who are like us. Those are the people, the people who thought about it, who worked at it, who we ultimately made the trilogy for and it now makes perfect sense to us that they should inherit the storyline.”

The following events occurred in The Matrix OnlineThe following was the conclusion of The Matrix Revolutions, Morpheus returned to the Matrix to consult the Oracle as to why, despite the apparent truce between the machines and humans, the machine had not yet returned Neo’s remains to Zion. Morpheus, along with a number of players who chose to join his faction, set about trying to reconstruct Neo’s Residual Self Image — his digitally generated avatar within the Matrix — as a way of hopefully resurrecting him. Frustrated by his failure to do so, Morpheus began demanding the Machines to return Neo’s body. With no other options, Morpheus then began detonating “code bombs” across the Matrix, compromising the integrity of the simulation as a whole as a way of forcing the machines to comply with his demands.

Morpheus set off one the code bombs and was captured by the Assassin. This program is created by Machines. Though some players speculated that Morpheus could have faked his own death and gone into hiding at that time, this theory was still unsolved. The Matrix Online’s cancelation in 2009.

[Ed. note: The following contains minor spoilers for The Matrix Resurrections.]

Resurrections by The Matrix doesn’t refute the events of The Matrix Online, but it’s not entirely clear if it all still lines up 16 years later. Lana Wachowski was able to pull a Yoko Taro/Nier maneuver and incorporate a long-dead MMO in the larger mythology surrounding the The Matrix Resurrections? Neo is told by Niobe in the film that after the events RevolutionsMorpheus was also elected to the top chair of the council. But when rumors started up that there was a “new power” taking over the machine world, he ignored them. “He was certain what you had done could not be undone. All of these people never stopped believing in miracles, believing in you.”

In way, we do see Fishburne’s Morpheus in ResurrectionsThis statue was built to honor a man whose history is deeper than any heroic hero. As for all being killed? The Matrix OnlineWell, it was a restart.