Warner Bros. Pictures has kicked off its marketing campaign for The Matrix: Resurrections with an interactive teaser trailer (or trailers, actually) on the revived website “What is the Matrix“.
The teaser starts with the classic question. Red pill or blue pill? Choose the red pill and your eyes will be opened to the truth. After the familiar strips of green characters, you’ll see snippets of the past conflict at the centre of the original Matrix trilogy with the voiceover telling you “it could be this is the first day of the rest of your life, but if you want it, you gotta fight for it.”
Exit the Matrix, or not?
The blue pill reprimands you for not being able to tell the difference between fact and fiction, follows up with many different shots of the pills and ends with the passive-aggressive threat, “We don’t want anyone to get hurt, do we?”
There isn’t much in the way of hard info but then it’s just a teaser so you’ll need to wait until we get closer to the 22 December release date. What we do know is Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss will reprise their roles as Neo and Trinity respectively.
What makes this teaser slightly different from most, other than the choice you’re forced to make, is that it uses clever code to detect the real-life time of your device and incorporate it into the trailer.
The other fun bit is that every time you watch either the red pill or blue pill trailer it uses different snippets from the movie. So everyone’s experience will be slightly different. Unless you keep rewatching it, which we totally didn’t…
This isn’t the first marketing campaign to do something cool with a movie trailer. A startup media company called D-ID allowed participants to enter the trailer themselves. By entering your name and uploading a photo the site would create a deepfake and insert you alongside Hugh Jackman in the trailer for the film Reminiscence.
We hope to see more of this sort of thing in the future from other production houses. If you haven’t already, check out the trailer for The Matrix: Resurrections. Which pill will you choose?
