Will Smith will not be joining Warner Bros. and director Drew Goddard in a new Matrix movie for the studio, insiders tell The Hollywood Reporter.
That leaves open a mystery Smith sparked on Monday with a cryptic Instagram post noting how Smith passed on the starring role of Neo in the original 1999 sci-fi epic The Matrix, directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski.
The Instagram post — featuring Matrix-style computer font — stated: “In 1997, the Wachowski’s offered Will Smith the role of Neo in The Matrix. Smith turned it down. He chose Wild Wild West, believing it was a better fit for him at the time. But the question remains: What would The Matrix have been like with Will Smith as Neo? Wake up, Will… The Matrix has you…”
The Matrix went on to be a generation-defining hit, while Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West was beaten up by critics and flopped at the box office. Smith starred opposite Kevin Kline, and played a gun-blazing former Civil War hero, in a rare miss for the king of the 1990s box office.
It is unclear what, if anything, Smith’s post on Monday is teasing.
Goddard, the writer-director behind The Martian, The Cabin in the Woods and World War Z, was tapped to write and direct a new Matrix feature for Warner Bros. last year. This will be the first Matrix film not directed by a Wachowski sibling, though Lana Wachowski will act as an executive producer on the new project.
Released just over 25 years ago, The Matrix swept the imaginations of audiences with a mind-bending story, envelope-pushing special effects and a defining performance from Keanu Reeves. The movie, grossing $467 million worldwide at the time, became a pop culture touchstone. The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions were released back to back in 2003 to extend the film franchise, with The Matrix: Resurrections arriving in 2021.
Smith rose to fame as a rapper and star of the ’90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and became one of the world’s biggest movie stars, doing films such as Independence Day (1996) and Men in Black (1997). He landed a hit last year with co-star Martin Lawrence in Sony’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die, which aimed in part to jump-start Smith’s movie career after he faced a scandal after slapping Oscar host Chris Rock on live television in 2022.