What’s more important to a movie studio executive than creating a movie franchise? Keeping a successful franchise going.
That’s been the reality of Hollywood for decades, and we’ve seen the results with the utter lack of creativity with respect to new titles.
So, when Matt Damon didn’t want to continue the Bourne franchise after three monster hits, the producers had to improvise.
Enter Jeremy Renner and a new character, Aaron Cross. Renner was an ascending star at the time, so casting him in the lead role made sense. But while the film did fairly well at the box office, it suffered a significant drop off from the previous installment.
The movie isn’t bad, and it delivers the frenetic actions sequences we’ve come to expect from the Bourne films. The movie takes place concurrently with the events of “The Bourne Ultimatum” and follows Cross, a member of Operation Outcome, an offshoot of the CIA’s black ops program Treadstone which created Jason Bourne. The writers add a new wrinkle to the story, as Outcome agents are genetically enhanced through a series of pills known as “chems” that improve their physical and mental abilities.
