Matt Damon Has Quietly Been Working On His Own ‘Jason Bourne 5’ For Years [The Backstory]

I got scooped. Sorta. I’d been following an ever-changing story for several years, but it kept evolving, pausing, going dark, and then perhaps stalled for good. It was unclear what was happening and where things were headed. The update from Deadline yesterday is that a fifth Jason Bourne film is in the works with “All Quiet On The Western Front” filmmaker Edward Berger in talks to direct. The gist of that story seems to be Universal wants ‘Bourne’ to move forward, has hired a director, and hopes to entice Matt Damon to star (but critically notes that Damon has not signed on yet).

READ MORE: Universal Wants More ‘Jason Bourne,’ Hires ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ Director, But Matt Damon Not Yet Attached

But the backstory goes back to around pandemic times or longer and is very different. Deadline’s report is clear. This version is motivated by Universal, who hopes to put a script together that will persuade Damon to join. But the truth is, according to sources The Playlist has talked to for years on this subject, Matt Damon himself and longtime ‘Bourne’ producer Frank Marshall have been trying to self-generate their own ‘Bourne’ project for a long time now.

In fact, a script has been written (at this point, probably several versions of it) by Scott Z. Burns, the writer of “The Bourne Ultimatum,” who got that job from all the crucial uncredited rewrite work he did on “The Bourne Supremacy” (Burns also wrote two other movies Damon starred in “Contagion” and “The Informant!”).

Damon is a writer (an Oscar-winner for “Goodwill Hunting”), knows what he wants, and had been working with Burns and Marshall on the project for months, tinkering, toying, changing it. The trio never really cracked the story they wanted to tell, and last I’d heard, it seemed like it wasn’t happening; they’d possibly lost their motivation for it, and Burns was moving on to other projects.

The trio had iterated on ideas for several years. One version they envisioned was a hand-off movie, where Damon would play the character one last time and then hand off the character to another, younger actor (Tom Hardy was the actor they proposed, but it was unclear if they ever reached out to him as they wanted their script airtight first).

In the early days, Damon and Marshall had kept it quiet because they had wanted a new, younger filmmaker. They loved Paul Greengrass but wanted to move on and not offend their friend. The movement would happen over the years, particularly at one point when Greengrass, a few years back, essentially took himself out of the running, suggesting if they were going to make a new ‘Bourne,’ movie, maybe they should find some new blood (perhaps they had finally talked).

So, it’s not clear, at the moment, if what Universal is doing is divorced from what Damon had been working on. Perhaps it’s just the next chapter of trying to get a new ‘Bourne’ movie off the ground, but the reality is their intention for more ‘Bourne’, is something that had been cooking for a long time.

If you read any Damon interviews from the last few years, you’ll know that Damon always looked at ‘Bourne’ as an important meal ticket and fallback. He could experiment all he wanted in films with George Clooney (“Suburbicon”), Christopher Nolan (“Interstellar,” in what was a secret uncredited cameo at the time before release, well, unless you read our site) or even flirt with superhero appearances (“Thor: Ragnarok” and “Deadpool 2”), but you could sense—especially if you knew what was in development— that Damon was itching a way to gain that back.

“The ‘Bourne’ movies, that was like a huge…it was like an inoculation,” Damon said about the ‘Bourne’ movies and the way they protected his career from failure in an August 2021 interview with Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. “Like where I knew I had another ‘Bourne’ movie coming in two years, and so I was really free to do whatever I wanted.” Shepard then described ‘Bourne’ as a career “safety net,” and Damon basically agreed.

During a 2023 Ringer podcast, Ben Affleck joked that he couldn’t afford Damon for “The Town,” and Bill Simmons asked Damon if this was true.  “Back then? Yeah,” he laughed. “I was in the middle of the ‘[Jason] Bourne’ run, and I was doing really well,” suggesting ‘Bourne’ had raised his overall quote.

That said, the impetus always seemed to be to land ‘Bourne’ with a more satisfying conclusion. “Jason Bourne,” the fourth edition with Damon and Greengrass, was mostly well-received but wasn’t universally loved. The film faced a rotten 54% score on Rotten Tomatoes (the lowest of the series) and only grossed $162.4 million domestically, only the third-highest in the franchise’s history.

Anyhow, the background and context of yesterday’s story that doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Let’s hope whatever Berger is developing aligns with everyone’s intentions and ideas moving forward.