If you’ve seen The Matrix Resurrections, you know that the fourth movie in this epic science fiction series is all about itself. Neo (Keanu Reeves) is back in the Matrix, living a simulated life as a famous video game designer named Thomas Anderson.
His most well-known game so far? A series of movies called “The Matrix.” What happens in these video games?
Thomas’s boss, Smith (played by actor Jonathan Groff), tells him one day that he needs to make a fourth Matrix video game. Thomas doesn’t want to do it. In the past, he’s had mental breakdowns because he couldn’t tell the difference between real life and his game. He also thinks that the story is over.
Smith tells Thomas, “I’m sure you can see why our beloved parent company Warner Bros. wants to make a fourth movie in the series.” “They told me that they were going to do it whether we were there or not.”
Even if there wasn’t a shout-out to Warner Bros., the studio that made The Matrix movies, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that director Lana Wachowski and co-writers David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon are at least partly talking about how they were asked to make a fourth Matrix movie.
Before The Matrix Resurrections was announced, there were rumors in 2017 that Warner Bros. was planning to relaunch the franchise without the Wachowski sisters, who had said they didn’t want to make another Matrix movie.
When you know this, the montage that comes next feels very personal. Thomas is surrounded by a lot of executives and creative people who insist they know what people want from The Matrix 4.
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The End-Credits Scene of The Matrix Resurrections
At the end of The Matrix 4, fans are surprised to see a reference to Citrix. If you stay in your seat or skip through HBO’s credits, you can see the game coders who were introduced earlier in the movie. They start the clip by saying, “Movies are dead,” “Games are dead,” and “Narrative is dead.” When one of the programmers asks what these two are talking about, they say “cat videos” and suggest a series of them for “viral conditioning” called the Citrix.
And that was the end of it: the Citrix. It’s not exactly a clip that would get people excited about a possible sequel. The clip seems to make fun of how much the internet loves cat videos and what’s popular.
It’s true that you can find videos of cats all over the world wide web. Without a doubt, there are a lot of cats on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other sites. Still, is it still funny to make jokes about that? Cat jokes are old, so putting them in a movie feels like a throwback to a different time.
When it comes to after-credits scenes, even the Avengers’ joke about shawarma was better. At least, it was a reference to an earlier scene in which Tony Stark says they’ll get shawarma after saving the world. The joke at the end of The Matrix 4 didn’t seem to go with what came before it.
Worse, the Resurrections clip might not make sense to people who have never seen memes or parodies. Since The Matrix came out in 1999, many of the youngest fans of the first movie are now in their 30s and 40s.
The parody of The Matrix, “The Matrix,” came out nine years ago. It showed real cats being “shot at” with foam balls in a hallway, just like Neo’s famous scene in the movie. This confused a lot of people who saw it. This joke after the credits will probably do the same thing.
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Still, the scene can be seen as an example of how good Lana Wachowski is at trolling. Showing that the coders are still debating what the next hit Matrix game could be and settling on the old standby of cats is sure to make people roll their eyes and groan.
The end credits scene of The Matrix Resurrections was the culmination of cat memes that have been going on for decades.
It used an old joke, but in doing so, it continued to subvert tropes and expectations. And that’s what the movie itself did from beginning to end. If the joke at the end of the credits was meant to be a bit of a Dad Joke and not very funny, it did exactly that.