Tuesday, October 5, 2010 at 7:00AM Tony Gilroy to Direct 'Bourne Legacy'
Tony Gilroy is first and foremost an award winning screenwriter and as a writer, his resume is quite impressive. He wrote all three Bourne series, Michael Clayton, Armageddon, and Devil's Advocate among many others. So at first glance it's surprising that Universal chose a writer with only two directing film credits to take over one of the greatest spy-action franchises of all time.
That being said Gilroy will be writing the fourth installment Bourne Legacy, and one of those two films he directed was Michael Clayton which I consider to be an excellent film. But this one does have some hurdles to jump over:
1. Matt Damon may not be coming back - Damon has been saying that he won't come back unless Paul Greengrass, director of the last two installments came back. Can you imagine this movie without him?
2. The novels which the movies are based on had a book by an award winning author who sold up to 500 million copies of his 25 books. The original Bourne series was written in the 80's and have been considered complete. Eric Van Lustbader wrote Bourne Legacy and actually wrote six more novels on Jason Bourne. It would be as if someone other than JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter volumes 8 through 14, 20 years from now.
So there are lots of question marks with this film. In fact, the studio is starting to back away from the 2012 release year and considering The Bourne Ultimatum released in 2007, we can almost consider this a reset in the series.
Reader Comments (2)
I don't like the name, and I hoe they change it. Legacy is being used by Tron. With Bourne, it just feels more appropriate to call the boxed set "Legacy" and go with something more revenge-y for the film.
That said, the day finally came when Sean Connery had to hang up James Bond. Jason Bourne surely will live on as interpreted by other actors as well.
I think it'll be tough to change the name considering the book is called Bourne Legacy.