Matrix 4 officially a go with Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss and Lana Wachowski

Always thought The Animatrix had some really good, interesting, parts to it. The one called Beyond always stuck with me, where the girl looking for her cat stumbles across a glitch in the world.

I wasn't. I enjoyed the whole franchise.

Yes, I still haven't read any news or even speculation about why only one of them is involved so far.
I know they led very private lives since after the release of the first movie, as they very rarely agreed to interviews.

how do you top Neo and Trinity dying to save all of mankind?

Their resurrection story, duh

The way you do it is by making the real world into just another layer of the Matrix, rendering the first three movies a complete waste of time.

You top it with the Second Coming.

Say that after the end of the original trilogy, things went well between the humans and the machines for hundreds or even thousands of years, but then they started taking a turn for the worse. Neo's something between a legend and a myth now. Most people can't say for sure if he was even a real person. But there are those who still believe that in mankind's darkest hour, the One will return to save them all. So we'd have Neo, Trinity and (maybe, hopefully?) Morpheus returning as future incarnations of themselves.

idk, I like that better than trying to find some way for Keanu to have survived the end of the third movie.

i'm still waiting for the live-action remake of the original ;)

As with anything else, it comes down to money.

Specifically:

New ideas are risky -- studios run the risk of losing money, if the idea is not popular.

Sequels/reboots/remakes are typically very safe -- there is very little risk of losing money, and a good chance of making a LOT of money, because there is an automatic customer base.

As much as some people complain... most people are thrilled with sequels/reboots/remakes, and they will happily spend money on them, even if they are not very good.

Perfect example: Tom Cruise's ridiculous "The Mummy" (2017). That movie made over FOUR HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS worldwide.

So while it's easy to blame the movie industry, they are just giving us what we're telling them we want.

Humans... what can you do?

It feels like the majority of media is targeted at the aging population and feeding our nostalgia.

More like targeted at the younger generations who haven't seen the originals countless times and are therefore more likely to be duped into spending money on a remake.

(See Canis39's response, above.)

It's not about being above a certain age, I saw plenty young ones acting similarly after looking at long haired male teenagers with darker outfit. It's more about how many brain cells they have allocated for the task. Certainly some of the characters in the Matrix joined the dark side, so probably those respectable ladies had a point.

I have vague memories of seeing something called Matrix 2 and 3 or something, but all I can remember is just Matrix indeed... I must have been dreaming. Well, nightmaring.

Didn't watch Jupiter Ascending, but I agree about Reloaded and Revolution. Pretty sure the sequels were rushed out by the studio and visibly they were more focused to leapfrog "the groundbreaking visual effects" of the first, rather than giving more thought for the story. So there's still hope that they cooked up a better story in the time they had.