Will Matt Damon Return To ‘Bourne’ With Nolan On Board?
For most of us, Tony Gilroy’s The Bourne Legacy starring Jeremy Renner had us hoping all the more for another Matt Damon turn as Jason Bourne. That’s not to say that Renner’s Bourne pseudo-sequel wasn’t alright, it just wasn’t the Bourne flick we deserved or needed.
Can Matt Damon be lured back to the Bourne series? Smart money is on “no,” but he’s enthusiastic if the story is there. Damon told ScreenRant:
“I’d love to, I really want to do another Bourne movie but we just can’t figure out the story. The studio had made a deal with the estate to make another film and so they weren’t in breach of their contract, they had to get a Jason Bourne movie out for 2012. And that’s when Tony came up with the idea of how to do one with Jeremy.
“I’ve talked to Paul about this, and it’s really just a question of how do you bring the character back? Is there a movie that’s as good as the other three that we did – and if we felt like there was, then we’d do it, but we just haven’t cracked it yet.”
Chances are, that story will never be “cracked.” SlashFilm reports that Damon even handed the Bourne reins over to the creative team behind the uber-successful Dark Knight Trilogy. Most specifically its screenwriter, Jonathan Nolan.
“I gave it to Jonah Nolan who did such a beautiful job with the Batman mythology – I mean along with Chris. I met with him and I said: ‘Would you take a look at this, because we really want to do it?’
“Jonah was great. He took like a month and really worked on it. He came back and said: ‘I can’t figure out how to do it.’ He told me: ‘You guys really ended it, you know,’ which we did. We had intended it to be a trilogy and he gets out at the end.
“Jason hasn’t been seen since 2004, so if we started writing a movie next year, we probably couldn’t get one out by 2014 and that would have been ten years since the CIA has completely lost track of him. So what has the character been up to all this time?”
So the short answer is this: They never should have made The Bourne Legacy and teased us with the possibility of another Matt Damon Bourne movie. Sure, he’d love to do it, but if there isn’t a story there and even Christopher Nolan’s brother can’t crack it, who can?
It might only be hypothetical, but do you think that Matt Damon and Christopher/Jonathan Nolan would make a good Bourne film?
