How The Matrix created the modern blockbuster

The movie, however, became a critical darling and a commercial smash hit, scooping four Oscars, hauling $467.2 million at the box office and spawning two sequels (a third would follow 22 years later).

Beyond its success, however, the lasting impact of The Matrix was how it sparked a revolution that would ultimately come to shape the modern blockbuster.

Before he was 'The One', Keanu Reeves was a far cry from the all-action superstar we’re used to seeing today.

Though he’d had some success with 1994’s Speed, the Bill & Ted actor was better known for his air guitar skills than his action chops. He wasn't even the Wachowskis’ first choice for the role of Neo, only landing the part after the likes of Will Smith, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio had all turned it down.

Like those who’d been considered before him, Reeves looked nothing like the leading men who fronted the box office in the '90s.

The decade was dominated by the likes of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Con Air and Cliffhanger - muscle-bound movies filled with vest-clad, square-jawed superstars performing physical feats in stories that were more concerned with pyrotechnics than plot devices.

Thanks to the gravity-defying physics of The Matrix, however, the likes of Schwarzenegger and Stallone would soon be obsolete.

Borrowing heavily from the choreographed kung-fu and balletic wire-work that was pioneered by Hong Kong action auteurs like John Woo - this was a new breed of film fisticuffs that demanded a new type of action hero.

It wasn’t just physiques that changed after The Matrix, though - filmmaking as we know it was forever altered after the Wachowskis' high-concept smash hit.

This was on-screen action that was unlike anything audiences had ever seen before. Thanks to technical advancements like "bullet time" - the slow motion effect that became the film’s calling card - The Matrix ushered in a new era of filmmaking where live-action and CGI could be seamlessly interwoven. And audiences lapped it up.

So much so that the film’s success opened the floodgates to a new wave of adaptations that studio execs had never been able to bring to the big screen, until now.

In many ways, The Matrix was Hollywood’s first successful superhero movie. Hard as it may be to imagine in an era dominated by comic book films, there was once a time when Hollywood had tried (and largely failed) to bring spandex-clad heroes to the silver screen.

Films like Richard Donner’s Superman, Tim Burton’s Batman and Sam Raimi’s Darkman had struggled to escape their inherent implausibility, caught between the cartoonish origins of their primary-coloured protagonists and the unrelenting realism of live-action cinema.

For all of its cyberpunk aesthetic, The Matrix was every inch a comic book movie. It may have looked cooler, but the film still followed a costumed hero engaging in gravity-defying derring-do. It even ends with Neo taking flight as Rage Against the Machine’s Wake Up roars over the final credits.

This was an evolutionary leap that showed Hollywood that cinemagoers could suspend their disbelief and invest as heavily in physics-defying special effects as they would in live-action.

Released alongside universe-expanding comic books, animated shorts and subsequent sequels, The Matrix also proved that you could maintain an audience’s attention beyond the auditorium. It was the first step on a road that eventually led us to Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man and the birth of Marvel’s all-conquering cinematic universe.

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The Matrix, however, wasn't just about spectacle - it was also about storyline.

It was influenced by everything from the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard and Descartes to the learnings from Buddhism and the Bible. There are even references to Japanese anime, gender identity, self-actualisation and the intricacies of computer programming language.

The end result was a collective "whoa" from audiences, who, like Keanu Reeves's hero, had their eyes opened to a whole new world.

This was mainstream entertainment that didn't spoon-feed us. Instead, it was complex and challenging, something that could be endlessly dissected and reinterpreted in the growing communities that were using dial-up modems to connect with like-minded fans in early online forums.

Without The Matrix, we don’t get cerebral cinema like Christopher Nolan’s Inception or Tenet. We don't get the kind of action that audiences loved in John Wick, or the special effects advancements that directors like Zack Snyder and Michael Bay would later hang their hats on.

You could even argue that had it not been for The Matrix, we’d have never got ambitious escapism on the small screen, either. Indeed, it’s impossible to imagine the thought-provoking fantasy served up by shows like Lost, Westworld, Black Mirror and Severance without the Wachowskis' influence.

A quarter of a century later, The Matrix’s influence is still being felt. It was a transformational event that, like its on-screen hero, sent ripples through reality. Like Morpheus's pill-based paradox, it offered audiences a choice to free their minds. It showed us a door to a different world and we collectively walked through it.

As a result, it didn’t just inspire the next generation of filmmakers, it gave them the blueprint for the modern blockbuster, one that they continue to follow to this day.

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