There’s so much potential when there’s only a single official source of lore and story and ancillary material pretty much makes it up as it goes along. Of course, as long as I’ve been alive and aware, Star Wars & The Empire Strikes Back have been gospel so I never knew of a time before either, but the Matrix had a similar season between 1999 and 2003 where comics and the anime special “The Animatrix” was fleshing out the world, allowing our imagination to take flight with all sorts of possible stories and sequels to come…and yet unlike The Empire Strikes Back, the Matrix sequels seemed to hamper things a bit and all the rich potential just seemed to dry up. Sure, we’ve had some stuff post Matrix Revolution that continued things for a bit (an MMO that eventually gave us the fate of Morpheus, IIRC) but until The Matrix Resurrection, there’s really not been much significant material, official or otherwise.
I also remember feeling similarly about the Metal Gear Solid franchise, where the first (okay technically third, but Metal Gear Solid was essentially a soft reboot and served as most people’s intro to the game) game was the right balance of gameplay, exploration, and cinematic presentation and the story had so much potential for the future of the series, only for the next sequel to get entrenched by the philosophical whims of the creator to the point that, by the fourth game, cut scenes were over an hour long and consisted more of people talking than action oriented, and it leaned so hard into the absurdity of everything (the first game had absurdity but with a sense of grounding to it, an illusion of believability and reality).
So yeah, thank you for the tangent, but it’s something I’ve always thought about when movies or games have such impactful and wonderful starts but kind of run into issues with the sequels and leaves me wondering what happened, what choices were made that sent them down this road and it didn’t live up to the potential, unlike Star Wars (which…yeah, kinda faced similar issues later on with sequel and prequel trilogies, but even then, a lot of good was salvaged from such things). For other examples: the Kingdom Hearts video games and the Pirates of the Caribbean film series.
You know what? I think I’ll create a whole new topic so others may add their own ideas. Check it out: Wasted Potential