The Bourne Legacy: Tony Gilroy Says Controversial Fourth Movie Was Attempt to Create Marvel-Like Universe

These days, Tony Gilroy is best known for co-writing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and serving as the showrunner for the movie's spinoff series, Star Wars: Andor. However, the galaxy far, far away isn't Gilroy's first foray into the world of franchises. He also co-wrote the screenplays for The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Bourne Legacy. The fourth movie was released in 2012 and starred Jeremy Renner as Aaron Cross, who was meant to be the new franchise lead after Matt Damon played the titular Bourne for many years. However, the movie was met with mixed reviews, and Damon ended up leading the franchise once again in the 2016 film, Jason Bourne, which Gilroy did not write. Recently, Gilroy had a big conversation with Deadline and talked about everything from his original pitch for Andor to dealing with toxic Star Wars fans. He also opened up about The Bourne Legacy and the original plans for the franchise.

"Look, man, I tried to give them a Marvel Universe with The Bourne Legacy, and they didn't want to take it," Gilroy shared. "I mean, honestly, that was the whole goal of that, to open it up ... The history of Bourne is one of the most shambolic success stories of all time. That would have been a great Hollywood book if someone had followed it from the very beginning. You'd never get everybody to tell the true story, but it just stumbled toward success all the way through. With Legacy, we really tried to give them, that was my goal, give them a Marvel Universe that they could open up, but there was so much bad blood and other stuff that it just didn't work for them."

He added, "I mean, what's the trick? The trick is imagination, ambition, and a real – I know it's just a cliche- but a real disrupt, you have to disrupt sh*t like crazy. You have to turn it upside down and say, 'Let's do the opposite.' Always looking, in every scene and every moment, 'What haven't we done before? What's new?' So you gotta be really ambitious and not safe. It's safety that's the enemy of expanding things, I think." 

Will Matt Damon Play Jason Bourne Again?

While there are currently no plans for Damon to play Jason Bourne again, the actor is teaming up with The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman again for The Instigators, which is being written by Chuck Maclean and is being developed for Studio 8 by Jeff Robinov and John Graham with Damon producing with Robinov, Graham, Affleck, and Kevin Walsh.

Would you have liked to see an expansion of the Bourne universe? Tell us in the comments!