As one of the most polarizing blockbusters of the year, which also scored a hybrid HBO Max release, there wasn’t much hope that The Matrix Resurrections would even come close to matching the hefty box office hauls posted by the original trilogy.
Matters weren’t helped when a projected five-day opening weekend of $41 million turned out to be a little over $23 million instead, and that’s without even mentioning the piracy-shaped elephant in the room. Any day-and-date debutant is going to be torrented into oblivion from the second it lands online, to the extent that some sites even release Top 10 rankings of the year’s most heavily-pirated film and television efforts.
One of the many downsides is that it ends up hampering not just box office figures, but viewership on the movie-in-question’s home platform. As per third-party aggregator Samba TV, The Matrix Resurrections was streamed for 2.8 million minutes over the weekend, which is roughly on par with The Suicide Squad.
That means the return of Keanu Reeves’ Neo is lagging well behind Godzilla vs. Kong and Mortal Kombat, so any grand plans for additional sequels that may or may not be in motion might not get much further than a conversation.