The movie that made Matt Damon jealous by existing: “Nobody bothered to call me”
It’s called the movie business for a reason, so no studio boss or movie mogul is obligated to phone Matt Damon and ask for his permission every time they want to make a movie. It would have been nice, though, since he ended up feeling somewhere between jealous and seething.
He’s the one making those calls these days as the co-founder of Artists Equity alongside his platonic life partner, Ben Affleck, with the pair joining forced to build productions from the ground up and shine a spotlight on filmmakers who may or may not even register on the radars of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters.
It’s been a long time since Damon’s had to worry about where his next job was coming from, with the Academy Award-winning screenwriter, ‘Best Picture’-nominated producer, and Golden Globe-winning actor having spent the last three decades entrenched as one of his generation’s foremost stars.
That still doesn’t give him the leeway to pump the brakes on a picture that runs the risk of damaging his cinematic legacy, making it especially ironic that the solitary spinoff to his career-defining franchise was, in fact, called The Bourne Legacy. Did it need to exist? No. Did it justify its existence? Also no. Was the original leading man thrilled that Universal made one without him? Clearly not.
“I found out they’re making another when somebody saw it on the internet,” he told Parade. “Nobody bothered to call me. I’m not in it, but even so, they’ll work Bourne into the title, I guess. Universal just wants to call everything The Bourne Something. So I guess they are trying to make another franchise, and as they say, ‘It isn’t over until it’s over.'”
He was right about those connections, since the pointless action thriller brought back Joan Allen’s Pam Landy, Albert Finney’s Albert Hirsch, and David Straithairn’s Noah Vosen, with Jason Bourne’s name being bandied around aplenty. It was released during that weird time when Hollywood seemed convinced that the best idea to continue an existing franchise was to place Jeremy Renner at the forefront, which didn’t go to plan.
The worst-reviewed entry in the Bourne saga by far, Legacy didn’t make enough money to warrant the sequel it was obviously aiming for a reality, and the entire experiment was dropped when Damon and Paul Greengrass agreed to return for their fourth tilt at the franchise, which rendered Renner irrelevant.
When asked for his thoughts on the finished article, Damon could only muster an unenthusiastic, “I did see it,” which was about all he had to say. It was also co-written and directed by Tony Gilroy, who he’d previously accused of writing a Bourne script so bad it could have ruined his career, so it’s entirely believable that Legacy didn’t win him over.
For the actor, it was Greengrass or bust, and when those stars did eventually align again for Jason Bourne, everyone went about their business and pretended there wasn’t even a spinoff at all.
