The pandemic had a disastrous effect on the film and television industry, and it’s far from over. The box office was crippled, with tens of billions of dollars being lost to the various lockdowns put in place all over the world, while the cost of every production skyrocketed due to the health and safety protocols that quickly became a requirement.
One of the most heavily-affected was The Matrix Resurrections, which was shut down for months and delayed by almost an entire year as COVID-19 ground the planet to a standstill. Not ideal circumstances for a mega budget sci-fi blockbuster, and things got so bad that director Lana Wachowski didn’t think cameras would ever start rolling again.
In an interview with Collider, star Jessica Henwick revealed that during the lengthy hiatus, Wachowski admitted that she wasn’t all that confident about the future of The Matrix Resurrections, claiming that it could go down in the history books as one of the most notable films that never made it to the big screen.
“When we were shut down for COVID and we went off three months, I still was at home training every day, even though we didn’t know if we were going back. When we got shut down for COVID, Lana said, ‘Well, maybe that’s it. Maybe we won’t come back and film the rest of it. Maybe the new Matrix will go down as this legendary film which incomplete, and no one will ever be able to see it. Maybe that’s what this is meant to be.’ And we were all going, ‘No, you have to finish the film.’
But she really did toy with the idea of just calling it quits… For me, even though I didn’t know whether we would come back, I couldn’t think about that, and so I trained throughout the entire break because I just had to focus. I just had to be positive and go, ‘No, we’re gonna go finish the film. We have to. This can’t be how my Matrix journey ends.'”
Of course, things eventually worked out in the end, and we’re a little over seven weeks away from The Matrix Resurrections coming to theaters and HBO Max. The marketing campaign is underway, with trailers and posters teasing another mysterious cyberpunk adventure, so Wachowski has been able to breathe easy for a while now.
