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The Matrix Resurrections post-credits scene, explained

The fourth Matrix movie landed in theaters and on HBO Max Wednesday, and there's a little surprise if you sit through the credits.

Sean Keane Former Senior Writer
Sean knows far too much about Marvel, DC and Star Wars, and poured this knowledge into recaps and explainers on CNET. He also worked on breaking news, with a passion for tech, video game and culture.
Expertise Culture, Video Games, Breaking News
Sean Keane
2 min read
Matrix Resurrections

The red pill may contain SPOILERS for The Matrix Resurrections.

Warner Bros.

The Matrix Resurrections is in theaters and on HBO Max now, and it's quite a trip down memory lane 18 years after the original trilogy ended. Unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, the Wachowskis' series isn't known for post-credits scenes, but the fourth entry does have a fun meta surprise for those who stick around.

Scroll down to take the FULL SPOILER pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

spoiler alert

The ending sees Neo and Trinity (Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss) escape the Matrix, seize control of the simulated world from The Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) and fly away to redesign it together. 

After the credits roll, we cut back to Deus Machina, the Warner Bros.-owned video game developer Neo was working for. Forced back into his Matrix identity, Thomas Anderson, he created a trilogy of games based on his memories of the previous movies' events (believing them to be mere creations of his imagination).

Early in The Matrix Resurrections, Neo's former nemesis, Agent Smith (Jonathan Groff), is living his new Matrix life as Anderson's business partner and hands down an order that Warner Bros. wants a fourth Matrix game. They set up a brainstorming session, and bounce around ideas about the game's action, a cerebral narrative and the series' signature Bullet Time. It's all so meta that you might briefly question reality.

Jonathan Groff in The Matrix Resurrections

This guy is all about going back to the Matrix.

Warner Bros.

We get a little more of this in the post-credits scene.

"Face reality. Movies are dead. Games are dead," a developer says. "Narrative is dead."

According to his colleague, media is just a "neuro-trigger response and viral conditioning." They suggest tapping into the glorious internet tradition of cat videos and suggest their next project should be a series of videos called "The Catrix." There is indeed a YouTube video with a similar name that features a bunch of acrobatic kitties.

It might also allude to The Analyst's cat, Deja Vu, which was a callback to the iconic moment in the original 1999 movie when Neo saw the same cat twice after the machines made an alteration to the Matrix. All animals in the Matrix are digital constructs.

It's unlikely we'll be seeing a fifth movie with this name, but we should all welcome our digital feline overlords if that time comes. Until then, let's all just consume cat content. Meow, meow.

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