Jason Bourne may not have opened to rave reviews in the vein of Universal’s original trilogy, but after pulling in a strong $4.2 million from Thursday night, Paul Greengrass’ franchise revival is all but set to enjoy a commendable opening weekend at the US box office.
Nine years on from the release of The Bourne Ultimatum, it’s really the reunion of Greengrass and series star Matt Damon that will draw the crowds, but looking further afield, the filmmaker told Deadline recently that he considers both Alicia Vikander and Riz Ahmed’s characters instrumental in the future of the Jason Bourne franchise.
Steering the franchise into a post-Snowden world of mass surveillance and social media, Vikander and Ahmed – one a CIA agent and potential confidant to Damon’s Bourne, the other a tech moghul – are very much ingrained in Greengrass’ rebooted franchise, and it’ll be interesting to see how the director continues to expand the backstory of each character moving forward.
“These franchises are really difficult to build for all the studios, and if you’re lucky enough to have been associated with one as I have, one that people love, you want the best for it. Renewing it, giving it somewhere to go that feels organic as opposed to just stuck in there, it is the hardest thing. That’s what I wanted to do. Once I decided to do another, it became very important to me to try, with some subtlety and elegance, to hand it back to Universal with places to go and characters that take it forward in a way that felt elegant and not false.”
Given Universal is keen to churn out as many Bourne movies as humanly possible, it’s really a question of when, not if Damon and Greengrass will return to the hit action series. Here, the director shares more details of the transition to a new era.
“Alicia’s character was part of that. Riz Ahmed’s character was, also. I wanted those characters to be of our landscape, today. ‘Bourne Ultimatum‘ and ‘Bourne Supremacy‘ were very much films of the mid-90s and mid-2000s. But we’re in a very different world now, and the audience that goes to see these movies now has a different way of looking at the world,” he added. “Theirs is a world dominated by social media, and the entire digital realm. I wanted to create characters that lived in their world, and hopefully somebody might want to pick that up. I’m sure they will, and you’ve got places to go with Bourne and with the other characters….it was an important part of the creative mission for me.”
Jason Bourne opens in theaters today, July 29. Tommy Lee Jones, Vincent Cassel and Julia Stiles also star, and you can have a gander at our own verdict right here.
