The Matrix in release order
The Matrix opens the list in March 1999. Four years later the Animatrix shorts began appearing one at a time: The Second Renaissance Part I in February 2003, Program in March, Final Flight of the Osiris in cinemas the same month, A Detective Story in April and The Second Renaissance Part II in May. The Matrix Reloaded and the game Enter the Matrix both came out on 15 May 2003, the film first. The last four shorts - Kid's Story, World Record, Beyond and Matriculated - followed on the Animatrix DVD in June, The Matrix Revolutions closed the trilogy that November, and The Matrix Resurrections ends the list in December 2021.
How to read this table
Everything is in the order it came out, oldest first. The columns:
- Air date — when the entry was first released. Where a page carries something first seen outside the United States, that is the date used, and the notes under the table say so.
- Sch — schedule order, which breaks a tie within a single day. On a night two of these went out, the earlier slot comes first - and a streaming episode that dropped after midnight comes before a programme broadcast that evening.
- Title — a small tag says what an entry is when it is not an episode: Film, Short or Game. A film's season and episode show as a dash, because those numbers are only how this list files it. A game is the story footage made for a video game - its cut scenes, watched together as one entry.
- Notes — click Notes ... on any row for the episode's links and, where there is one, an explanation of the cross-over.
- Watch — where you can watch that entry, in your own country. The badges link to the episode itself rather than to the service's front page. On a narrow screen this column is hidden - tap Notes ... on a row to see the same thing.
- Watched — tick a box and it is remembered in this browser. Turn syncing on in Preferences and it follows you between devices, with no account and no email address. An episode listed on more than one franchise is ticked on all of them at once.
Three icons can appear in the Notes cell, and they are the reason this site bothers with release order at all:
Story impact — this episode references another series in the franchise.
Story arc — it is part of a story running across several series.
Guest star — a character from another series appears in it.
In the Watch column, the shape of a badge is the difference between watching something now and paying for it again:
- P+ Solid — included with a subscription to that service.
- P+ Outlined — there to rent or buy.
Your country is worked out from your connection and can be changed in Preferences. It is a snapshot rather than a live check, so treat it as a strong hint rather than a promise — services add and drop things constantly.
| Air DateDate | Schedule OrderSch | Verse | Series | SeasonS | EpisodeE | Title | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1999-03-31 | 1 | MATRIX | Movies | 1 | 1 | The Matrix | Notes ... |
| 2003-02-04 | 1 | MATRIX | The Animatrix | 1 | 2 | The Second Renaissance Part I | Notes ... |
| 2003-03-05 | 1 | MATRIX | The Animatrix | 1 | 5 | Program | Notes ... |
| 2003-03-21 | 1 | MATRIX | The Animatrix | 1 | 1 | Final Flight of the Osiris | Notes ... |
| 2003-04-04 | 1 | MATRIX | The Animatrix | 1 | 8 | A Detective Story | Notes ... |
| 2003-05-06 | 1 | MATRIX | The Animatrix | 1 | 3 | The Second Renaissance Part II | Notes ... |
| 2003-05-15 | 1 | MATRIX | Movies | 1 | 2 | The Matrix Reloaded | Notes ... |
| 2003-05-15 | 2 | MATRIX | Games | 1 | 1 | Enter the Matrix | Notes ... |
| 2003-06-03 | 1 | MATRIX | The Animatrix | 1 | 4 | Kid's Story | Notes ... |
| 2003-06-03 | 2 | MATRIX | The Animatrix | 1 | 6 | World Record | Notes ... |
| 2003-06-03 | 3 | MATRIX | The Animatrix | 1 | 7 | Beyond | Notes ... |
| 2003-06-03 | 4 | MATRIX | The Animatrix | 1 | 9 | Matriculated | Notes ... |
| 2003-11-05 | 1 | MATRIX | Movies | 1 | 3 | The Matrix Revolutions | Notes ... |
| 2021-12-22 | 1 | MATRIX | Movies | 1 | 4 | The Matrix Resurrections | Notes ... |
About this order
The four Matrix films, the nine shorts of The Animatrix, and the story Enter the Matrix tells in its cut scenes. The Animatrix and the game all came out in the first half of 2003, around The Matrix Reloaded, and that is the stretch where the order matters.
What is on this list
Every Matrix film, every Animatrix short, and Enter the Matrix. The game is here as one entry for its cut scenes: about an hour of footage the Wachowskis wrote and directed with the cast of Reloaded, telling the story of Niobe and Ghost that runs alongside that film. It is marked Game, and Choose series, above the table, can leave the game, the shorts or the films out.
Not on the list: The Matrix Online (2005), an online game with no filmed footage that closed in 2009; The Matrix: Path of Neo (2005), a game that retells the films, mostly with clips from them; and The Matrix Awakens (2021), a technology demo released for games consoles thirteen days before Resurrections. A fifth film was announced in 2024 and has no date.
The Animatrix, one short at a time
The nine shorts are best known from the DVD of June 2003, but five of them were out before it. Four were put online, free, on the official site, and Final Flight of the Osiris played in cinemas ahead of Dreamcatcher. They are dated here by those first releases, and the four that first appeared on the DVD are in the disc's running order. A Detective Story is dated 4 April 2003: IMDb's 5 March is Program's date repeated.
Reloaded and the game on the same day
Both are dated 15 May 2003, the day the film opened and the game went on sale in the United States. The film is first: it had public showings from ten o'clock the night before, and nothing records the game on sale before the morning of the 15th.
How the strands meet
Final Flight of the Osiris ends with the crew's last message posted inside the Matrix; Niobe and Ghost collect it at the start of Enter the Matrix, and its warning that the machines are digging towards Zion is the news Reloaded opens on. Kid's Story introduces the Kid, whom Neo meets again in Reloaded, and Trinity appears in A Detective Story. The Second Renaissance shows the war between humans and machines that Morpheus describes in The Matrix.
Where the links go
Every entry links to IMDb, Wikipedia and the Matrix Wiki. None of the shorts has a Wikipedia article of its own, so each links its section of the article on The Animatrix, and the Matrix Wiki covers both parts of The Second Renaissance on one page.