I feel bad for Doug Liman. Sure, he directed The Bourne Identity, which set the general tone for the two following movies and reinvented Matt Damon as a quiet badass, but everyone knows the true genius behind the series is Paul Greengrass. Let’s look at the evidence: One of Doug Liman’s follow-up to his Bourne movie was Jumper, one of Greengrass’ was United 93. You tell me who has the talent. And if there is any justification to make a fourth Bourne flick, it would have to be that Matt Damon and Greengrass are both involved.
Well, it looks like that won’t be the case any longer. According to The Playlist, Greengrass has walked away from the fourth Bourne flick due to ongoing disagreements regarding the script and Universal’s increasing concerns over his budget management skills. Problems first arose when Universal hired Josh Zetumer without Greengrass’ approval to write a “parallel” script to go along with George Nolfi’s screenplay.
This adds to the fact that the budget of his latest Matt Damon vehicle, the Iraq War thriller Green Zone, continues to balloon due to reshoots and months of editing. And as amazing as Green Zone looks, we all know that the Iraq War genre hasn’t been very fruitful for studios. The movie was meant to be a small pet project (much like Christopher Nolan did with The Prestige between Batman flicks) but has now turned into a $150 million monster.
This leads to an obvious question: what about Matt Damon? Well, Matt has gone on the record as saying that’s he loyal to Paul and would only return to the series if Paul went along with him. Of course, there’s always the fatty paycheck that I’m sure Universal has agreed to give him, but will it be enough for Damon to act in a subpar sequel with a subpar director and a subpar script? I guess it depends how sweet that check is.
