Does The Matrix have a post-credit scene?

No filmed scene — but there is something after the credits, and almost nobody watching a streaming copy today has seen it.

The Matrix ends on Neo's phone call to the machines and his ascent out of frame, with Rage Against the Machine's Wake Up crashing in and carrying the entire crawl. Nothing interrupts it. When the last card clears, though, the 1999 theatrical prints put up a plain text screen: www.whatisthematrix.com, and beneath the address, a password — steak.

That was not decoration. Warner Bros. built the film's official site as a puzzle box with a hidden link that demanded a password, and the one handed out at the end of the credits opened a cache of exclusive material — production art, foley recordings, clips — which then handed you the next password in the chain. The word choice is the joke. Cypher sells out humanity over a piece of simulated ribeye he knows is not real, and the film's parting gesture is to offer the audience exactly the same bargain: take the fake steak, get more Matrix.

It is also the cleanest early example of a film using the end of its credits as an address bar. The site had already carried the marketing campaign — the trailer refused to explain the premise and pointed at the URL instead — and it went on to serve as the franchise's official home, hosting The Matrix Comics from 1999 to 2003, until Warner took it down in October 2009.

Nothing is set up. There was no sequel in production when the film opened; Reloaded and Revolutions were greenlit only once the box office made them inevitable, and neither is hinted at here. What the closing card sets up is the viewer's own homework, which is a very 1999 way to end a movie. Let the credits run to the end anyway.