That didn’t take much, did it? Three-and-a-half weeks after Universal acknowledged development on a follow-up to last year’s The Bourne Legacy, Twitch tell us the studio have, already, found themselves talking with original Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass — should you need another reason to never trust yours truly, remember a typing of “for the time being, don’t count on seeing Jason Bourne” — with that respective star-director duo only likely to return with one another along for the trip, reportedly making negotiations a more-complex-than-usual matter.
And there remains the matter of Jeremy Renner, whose future involvement has been left slightly unclear by the story at hand. It’s said that Universal hope to stick with the chems-dependent Aaron Cross, “regardless of what happens on the Damon front,” but nevertheless hope to work out those ways in which a pair of on-the-run agents might find one another, should their original star come back around.
I’d take this as a slightly surreptitious way of saying hired scribe Anthony Peckham isn’t too deep into the writing phase on a fifth installment, a job which none of us should envy. How do you resurrect the titular protagonist without undermining a new hero? The balancing act should be a curious thing to see play out, no matter how little screenplays may have mattered to the series’ finer moments — but with Greengrass back behind the camera, sufficient reason for hope exists.
As for movies the Englishman is guaranteed to make / have made, here’s a new Japanese trailer for his NYFF opener, Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks:
What do you think of Damon and Greengrass getting back on Bourne?