I can only imagine how awful this would be after WB hands them another two hundred-million-dollar check. We’d get Eddie Redmayne as some hammed up, overly affected Agent X or some bullshit.

No thanks.

Far as Penn... I'll withhold judgment. He's writing Pacific Rim and Ready Player One. WB might well be impressed with his work on those so who knows, he might be on the rise. To be fair It seems like all of Penn’s worst outings were co-writing credits and he wrote the story for X2 and Avengers (co-credit with Whedon) and those are strong credits.

It could be worse though, they could’ve tapped Snyder for this, though he’d be a great choice from a visual standpoint. MBJ is an excellent choice to anchor this so I’ll withhold judgement until more information comes out.

Also I’d rather not see a Morpheus origin story or prequel of any kind. I’d rather see this as another iteration/cycle, perhaps with a few references/connections to the prior film. Given the subject matter it shouldn’t be hard to do that.