Universal Buys Rights to ‘Jason Bourne’ Franchise

The Jason Bourne franchise is almost certainly on the road to returning to screens with new films or TV shows.

That’s because NBCUniversal just announced that it now owns the rights to produce content based on Robert Ludlum’s Bourne novels, in perpetuity.

Universal previously released five Bourne movies from 2002 to 2016. Four of the five starred Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, an amnesiac spy fighting to get his life back. They also produced one season of a spinoff TV show, Treadstone, named after Bourne’s clandestine spy agency, in 2019.

Ludlum wrote his first Bourne novel, The Bourne Identity, in 1980, then followed it with The Bourne Supremacy in 1986 and The Bourne Ultimatum in 1990. The Damon films do not follow the plots of the novels.

After Ludlum passed away in 2001, Eric Van Lustbader began a new series of Bourne novels, starting with The Bourne Legacy in 2004. (That, in turn, became the title of the fourth Bourne film, which starred Jeremy Renner instead of Damon.) Van Lustbader wrote 11 Bourne novels before handing the series to author Brian Freeman, who continues to write new Bourne stories at a clip of about one novel a year.

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Here was Universal president Peter Cramer’s statement on the news:

Since its debut in 2002, the iconic Bourne franchise has reshaped the spy genre with groundbreaking films that set new standards for cinematic action. We’re energized to continue expanding the Bourne universe into the future with exciting new stories for global audiences.

Universal held the rights to the Bourne franchise until last March, when WME began shopping the series for the Ludlum’s estate. But now the rights will remain at Universal into the future, which all but guarantees more Bourne stuff from them in the future. You don’t buy the rights to a franchise not to make stuff with it.