For a guy who made a career out of playing men with disappearing identities, Matt Damon has a pretty clear-eyed relationship with nostalgia: it only works if it pushes the character somewhere new. On Netflix’s Skip Intro podcast while promoting “The Rip,” Damon found himself back in familiar territory—the perennial question of whether “Jason Bourne” will ever resurface. The series, he reminded, was never engineered as a plug-and-play machine, which is why the next chapter has to arrive with a real reason to exist.
That’s where Damon landed when the conversation turned to the “Bourne” franchise: affection is easy, but the high bar is the problem. “I [love the ‘Bourne’ franchise] too. The issue is finding a story that is worthy of saddling back up and doing it,” he said. “We all love it, but we made them all as one-offs. It wasn’t planned as a trilogy.”
READ MORE: Matt Damon Has Quietly Been Working On His Own ‘Jason Bourne 5’ For Years [The Backstory]
The way Damon told it, the franchise’s defining strength—its self-contained, in-the-moment intensity—also became the thing that complicated any long runway planning. Damon said he signed up for just one film at first, and there was always loose talk about planning another, but the focus always remained on the movie they were making in the here and now first.
“We’re gonna get this one right, and then we’ll worry about the next one,” he said of the franchise’s ethos, which became its own kind of challenge. Part of that “one-off” feel, he suggested, came from how the first film was built on a foundation that wasn’t interested in long-term franchise scaffolding. “Tony Gilroy’s script took the premise of the books and just departed completely, and he just did his own thing, which was great and the right movie to make.”
Bourne, in his telling, was always narrower—more character-first, more psychologically specific—and those are qualities that don’t automatically translate into infinite installments.
“We didn’t really set ourselves up for a long run, but it was never intended to be a James Bond evergreen where you could even switch out actors, or even switch out the character— each one is a different bad buy, a different mission, a different thing,” he explained. “It’s harder, it’s not built to be James Bond.”
That character-first emphasis is also where Damon located the central narrative snag: the amnesia engine that powered the first films doesn’t reset forever without starting to feel like it’s circling the same drain. And Damon didn’t pretend that the problem hadn’t been staring them in the face for years.
Prompted about cracking the next script, Damon seemed optimistic, but also pragmatic, having seen the script drafts and treatments they’ve tried over the years since “Jason Bourne,” clearly not having come up with one that he loved.
“I hope so,” he said about making another ‘Bourne’ movie. “It’s a tough one, because the central conceit, his amnesia, he’s trying to get his memory back.
“And for the first three movies, I kinda get my memory back three times,” he chuckled, self-deprecatingly. “I think, each movie I go to, ‘I remember everything,’ and then the next one, I go, ‘Oh, there’s that I didn’t remember. But now I do.’ So, we were kind of running out of road.”
Even with that reality check, Damon didn’t sound like someone backing away—he sounded like someone waiting for the one version that earns its existence. The desire is there, he said; the missing piece is the script that justifies the return.
And that tracks with what we’d heard behind the scenes: the “right idea” problem hadn’t been theoretical. Back in 2023, The Playlist reported that Damon and longtime producer Frank Marshall had been trying to self-generate a new “Bourne” project for years, enlisting writer Scott Z. Burns (“Bourne Ultimatum”) to draft multiple versions—at one point even floating a potential “handoff” concept that could have passed the baton to a younger actor (with Tom Hardy among the names they’d discussed internally).
By 2025, The Playlist also noted that the studio’s push eventually shifted toward Edward Berger—and that the most recent draft in the pipeline had been written by Joe Barton (“Black Doves”), though the film still hadn’t been greenlit.
As for the currently gestating “Ocean’s 14,” from writer/director George Clooney, Damon sounded open to the idea, but emphasized that it was still in the “nothing’s real until the pages are real” zone.
Damon was interested, but said he hadn’t seen a script yet. “I keep hearing about this, but we have to get a script, we have to get a lot of ducks in a row,” he cautioned. “[But], I do know everyone would love to do it, the group of people would love to get back together.”
Then, when Smith floated the idea of Ben Affleck sneaking into the mix for a cameo, Damon didn’t hesitate: “So would he!” he laughed. “He’s like, ‘I’ve been trying to get into these movies—how many of these things have you done??’ Maybe we can put him in as a cameo as Ben Affleck in a casino somewhere playing poker.”
Watch the full interview below.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2007. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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