The Matrix Resurrections might bring Keanu Reeves's Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss's Trinity back into our lives, but there is one notable absence.
We knew before the movie was released that Morpheus would be in it, only with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II playing him rather than Laurence Fishburne. When asked in June 2021 about his absence, Fishburne confirmed that he wasn't in Resurrections.
"I am not in the next Matrix movie and you'd have to ask Lana Wachowski why, 'cause I don't have an answer for that," he explained.
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After the experience we've had recently with Spider-Man: No Way Home, there was always the possibility that Fishburne was hiding the truth. After all, his Morpheus was seen in the first clip released from the movie.
But now that The Matrix Resurrections is out, we have the truth. In order to explain all though, we have to go into some spoilers for the new movie, so look away now if you haven't seen it yet.
Unfortunately, there is no new footage of Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in The Matrix Resurrections, but we do get to see a lot of reused footage from the original trilogy.
The most significant chunk of this comes when Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and the 'new' Morpheus (we'll get to him in a bit) are persuading Thomas Anderson (Reeves) that his world isn't real.
To do so, they recreate Neo's first meeting with Morpheus and we see footage from the first movie which, in this new iteration of the Matrix, is from the video game trilogy that Thomas created. There are other flashes of OG Morpheus during the movie, including when Thomas first refuses to take the red pill.
Before he's taken back into the real world, Thomas is told that although he thinks it's been 20 years since he released the game trilogy, it's actually been 60 years in the real world. At the end of Revolutions, Morpheus was alive in the real world, so what happened since?
We have to wait until Neo reunites with Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) in the new city of IO where humans and machines live in harmony. As she shows Neo the fruits of his sacrifice (literally, they can make strawberries now), they arrive at a statue of Morpheus.
He was made High Chair of the Council following the events of the trilogy and was confident that Neo had fulfilled the prophecy. Morpheus was so confident that when rumours started of a "new power" rising in the Machine City, he ignored them as he thought the war was over.
This led to the destruction of Zion and it's assumed Morpheus was killed too as a result, while the survivors fled to IO and started the new city with the machines who wanted peace. As Niobe puts it, Zion lived in a world where it was "us or them" and IO was "built by us and them".
So if Morpheus is actually dead (and it's not 100% confirmed, but heavily implied), what's the deal with the new Morpheus?
It turns out that Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's version is a program created by Thomas in the new version of the Matrix. He's a combination of Morpheus and Agent Smith who Thomas, at that point, assumes are just characters in his video game.
He put this program in a modal, a simulation where programs can learn to evolve, and he left a door open for Bugs to hack into. She does so in the opening sequence of the movie and sees Morpheus, although he's acting like Agent Smith.
When she gets to speak to him though, he learns he's actually Morpheus "and I have to find Neo", leading to him escaping into the new world.
Thanks to advanced technology, this new version of Morpheus can appear and interact in the real world due to magnetic nanoparticles creating a body for him. He has all the memories of Morpheus from the original trilogy, but he isn't Morpheus as we know him.
It likely rules out a future appearance from Fishburne in the role in a potential Matrix 5, but that's not to say we can't get any flashbacks to fill in the gaps.
The Matrix Resurrections is out now in cinemas and is also available to watch on HBO Max in the US.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
