Originally posted by Sheepy
Im sure i read it somewhere that they had planned the matrix sequals, but it kinda hinged on the sucsess of the origonal as to wether they would go into production or not ... IIRC
of course it could, same goes for, say, starwars. there's stories where they've written enough for a few sequels, and I guess many movies which never had sequels because they didn't do so well have the synopsys of a "2" in the storywriter's desk.
The thing is, Matrix doesn't sound like this to me. It works great as it is, there's nothing to add. SWep4 ( which first had no "episode" **** whatsoever, then when shown in europe had "episode1" attached to it

) worked well alone too ( yeah, even the happy end ), but there was a lot of stuff to explain/deal with. you never felt like SW is mor like a stand-alone movie plus a two-parts sequel?
Now take a movie you loved, one with things you don't understand " what the hell happened to the bad guy at the end?". probably had a sequel planed, but didn't work well enough for it to be produced.
So, and the deal about Matrix:
well, compare this:
-"fans, everybody in the world, by witnessing the success of our movie, we feel like it would please everybody if we were to work our ass off to make a sequel and expand the universe we've created"
-"fans, now that you've seen what's went in the first chapter, are you ready for chapter 2 of the huge trilogy story that is The Matrix?"
which one makes you want to see it more? the "cool, people, we've made a sequel to make more money, come, come!" or the " yeah, we have a fully elaborated three chapters movies series that have been all worked together and will complete each other to form a seamless completly story".
The choice of which to say is pretty obvious to me, and to the producers.