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Friday
21Aug2009

New Writer Hired for Next Jason Bourne Movie

Universal desperately wants to keep the Jason Bourne series alive, and even though Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon seem amenable to it, the series and the actor and director are so successful, I don't get the sense that they have to do it. So when Universal comes up with a great script, then and only then will it move forward.

So now, producers Frank Marshall and Jeffrey Weiner have brought in Josh Zetumer to finish the work George Nolfi started on the untitled fourth chapter, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Nolfi had worked on the Bourne Ultimatum script, in concert with several other writers, and was going to be the primary writer on this film as well.

However, with his directorial debut getting the green light - a Philip K. Dick adaptation called The Adjustment Bureau that will also star Damon - Nolfi has had to back out of the Bourne project.

Universal remains hopeful that Nolfi can return to the project once Adjustment wraps up. Of course, since Damon is the reason either of these movies is really happening, Bourne can't go forward until Adjustment concludes. So until that happens, the job belongs to Zetumer, who will write a new screenplay that does not necessarily depend on Nolfi's previous efforts. Zetumer is also working on the script for the new update of Frank Herbert's Dune, so clearly, he's in demand at the moment.

At one point in all of this, Bourne 4 was going to shoot early next year in South America, a destination the globe-trotting former amnesiac had yet to visit in his journey to topple the CIA one hand-to-hand scuffle at a time. Damon had put the brakes on any of that talk earlier this summer, insisting there was no script, so there was no movie.

But if Universal isn't willing to wait another eight or nine months for Nolfi to turn his attention back to Bourne, then it sounds like the studio would like to keep this on that kind of early 2010 schedule that had been rumored.

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