Warner Bros. will release the fourth installment in The Matrix movie series on December 22nd but the real action may just be the launch yesterday of the Matrix NFT Avatar project. Within a couple of hours of the initial sale of 100,000 avatars the queue among would-be collectors had already surpassed 100,000. Twelve hours after launch, the queue exceeded 200,000.
Of course, there are more people in line than there are NFTs to sell even if everyone just purchased one. Most buyers are expected to buy several at $50 a pop. It appears that just over 35,000 people made it to the front of the line as of 1:00 am EST on December 1st. That does not mean that all 35,000 actually purchased avatars. Some may have missed their 60-minute window or decided to pass on the opportunity.
With that said, Niftorious has confirmed that one minter that had a queue number of around 28,000 was able to mint five avatars after waiting eight hours in line. And, it appeared that nearly 50% of the inventory was still available which means many people were simply buying one avatar. The company paused minting overnight and plans to resume on the morning of December 1st so you may still have a chance if you check early on Wednesday to see where you are in the queue.
Why it’s important
- The Matrix is not the first movie franchise to announce or mint an NFT. However, it is the first to generate 100k NFT character avatars that will be used in a movie-inspired game. This is an innovative approach to marketing the movie and a new digital experience simultanously.
- At $50 each, Warner Bros. is set to collect $5 million in revenue from the primary sale. It also will take a cut of secondary sales and likely will have in-game purchase options to drive even more revenue. Not every movie is going to be a good fit for this type of NFT, but it could become a key revenue driver of future projects and materially change movie financing.
- The move is a great PR stunt to gain more exposure for the movie in advance of the release. It would be even more clever if the NFT came with a free ticket to see the movie or offered some perq to holders. Today, the benefit seems to be collection and access to the new game.
- The avatars are all unique and do not represent characters in the film. They were created using Epic’s MetaHuman virtual human creation engine and represent an augmentation of the movie as opposed to a representation of they key characters.
How it Works
- Collectors could join the queue at 12:30 pm EST on November 30th and sales began at 1:01 pm EST.
- Once a collecter reached the front of the line, they had 60 minute to mint up to 25 Matrix NFT Avatars for $50 each.
- Secondary sales will be available on Nifty’s marketplace.
- 5% of the NFTs (5,000) will be witheld for promotional activitie and giveaways.
- On December 16th, avatar holders will be asked to take a red or blue pill and will then be segmented into different groups.
- There will be missions, competitions, and leaderboards for red pill and blue pill competitors.
What’s Next
Next up is the pill selection and then the competitions begin. Oh, and there is a movie premiere coming up if anyone is interested in that story. There are so many parallels between the NFT world, metaverse, and The Matrix that this is bound to be a popular collectible even beyond its in-game value.
With that said, 100k doesn’t seem like a large enough number to support all of the consumers likely to be interested in the game. It will be interesting to see if strong consumer demand leads the studio to introduce a new batch of avatars to capture additional revenue and expand the game user base or if they will maintain the rarity and the value of the avatars will simply increase. This is an experiment worth watching.
