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On one hand, Laurence Fishburne is keen on entering the MCU as Professor X. On the other, he appears to be keen on leaving The Matrix, the franchise in which he portrayed the captain of the human-led hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar, for good. While he has commented on his involvement in the fifth film in the franchise, he isn't sure about his return.
During a panel at the New York Comic Con 2025, he made a comment on his return that,
"It depends on how good it is, really. If it's great, then yeah, if it makes sense."
He added,
"I don't know if it makes sense."
Maybe his second comment imakes more sense and gives us a sense that Morpheus will not take the shape of Laurence Fishburne in the future.
The actor has portrayed Morpheus in three of the four films in the franchise but was replaced in the fourth one.
While the first three films were a commercial success, the recent one became a box office flop after it failed to even earn an amount equal to its production budget of $190 million.
Who replaced Laurence Fishburne in the fourth Matrix film?
In the latest installment in the series, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II replaced Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in The Matrix Resurrections. The actor has portrayed supervillain Black Manta in DC films, Aquaman (2018) and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023). Other than that, he has also appeared in the superhero series Watchmen (2019), where he portrayed Doctor Manhattan, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen appears as a different version of Morpheus, a part of a simulation Keanu Reeves's Neo has created called Modal. in addition to that, he also appears as fragments of Neo's nemesis, Agent Smith, a character originally portrayed by Hugo Weaving in the first three films.
Although James McTeigue initially refused any plans for more films in the franchise, Warner Bros. confirmed last year that another movie is in development.
The role of Morpheus in the original Matrix trilogy
Even though Neo is the main man in the entire franchise, Morpheus is the most important character in the story. He finds Keanu Reeves's Neo in the first movie and offers him the choice of consuming a red pill and a blue pill. Consuming the former would allow Neo to enter the real world that's become a dystopia and consuming the latter would allow him to return to the sweet life he was living.
Morpheus is looking for Neo in the film longer than Neo was looking for Morpheus, which is clear from a dialogue Fishburne's character utters during a conversation, which goes like this:
"Neo, you may have spent the last three years looking for me, but I have spent my entire life looking for you."
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He later went on to appear in the second and third films, where the fight to save Zion continues throughout the story.
Keep reading Soap Central for more updates on the fifth Matrix film.
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