This is a reading response to an article on "The Matrix" franchise by Henry Jenkins titled "Searching for the Origami Unicorn". If you don't know anything about "The Matrix", go watch the movies. They're pretty good.
Accessing my own memory from when I first watched “The Matrix”, I remember it being, in my eyes, awesome. It was an action movie with an original plot that dealt with technology, and being the usual ATEC student, I love technology even in my earlier years. It was also scary, thinking that our world could actually be an illusion brought about by super intelligent robots. All in all it’s a great series, though I still have not watched the last movie.
However, after reading Henry Jenkin’s article on “The Matrix”, I’m just learning now that it was much more than just a trilogy of movies, but the franchise also included games, novels, and comics as well. Being a fan of the movies, reading this news makes me want to go out on the internet and find all of the parts of “The Matrix” that I missed.
This development reminded me of other franchises that also releases content trans-media: the “Left 4 Dead” and “Team Fortress” franchises. These both started as games created by the developers at Valve. After both games were released cross-platform, meaning released to multiple game consoles, they gained amazing reviews as well as large fan followings. Soon, the stories of the characters were revealed further through comics release on their respective blog sites on the web as well as through extra videos on YouTube.
I love both franchises for continuing and growing on their stories through multiple media, however, not many people did with “The Matrix” apparently. Most stuck to the movies and not many others understood the franchise as a whole except for the geeks that found the other media content. They were good action movies to the general public, but the story escaped many people.
Henry stated in his article that there is not an “aesthetic criteria for evaluating works that play themselves out across multimedia”. I hope that someday, there are criteria to judge and crossing multiple media with a franchise becomes a mainstream thing for companies to consider and implement.
