The Prospect of a Sixth Jason Bourne Movie

I was surprised to hear of plans for a "Jason Bourne 6" some time ago.

Little has been heard of the project for some time, and it may be that the movie is at this point stuck in development hell. But that there had been any seriousness about the project is in itself surprising--at least, if one overlooks the extreme franchise addiction of the studio executives.

After all, it has been almost a quarter of a century since the first Jason Bourne film, and now nearly a decade since the last entry in the series, 2016's Jason Bourne--all as the franchise hit its commercial peak with the third film way back in 2007 with The Bourne Ultimatum (not incidentally, also the logical ending of the series), with all that implies for the franchise's vitality and cachet. Indeed, at this point it is common for a series' runners to be thinking "reboot" rather than "sequel," and that the producers have not gone that course due to the fact that the attempt at a reboot they already made with the fourth film (again, because number three was the logical ending) failed, making the executives hasten to get Matt Damon back into the series, with, again, what that implies about the shakiness of the series' standing.

However, as if this were not enough there is the reality that in the significantly contracted post-pandemic franchise action movies are offering more risk and less return than they used to do, and the Bourne movies are not particularly strong contenders here. At the box office they were respectable earners, not spectacular earners, Bourne Ultimatum taking in a mere $443 million, not quite $700 million in January 2025 dollars, and the last film, Jason Bourne, with a gross of $550 million in today's terms (such that it did not make Deadline's list of the year's top twenty profit-makers), leaving the margins less impressive than they might be. Meanwhile the boom in Hollywood spy-fi that got underway in the '90s seems to have run its course--for the last entries in the James Bond, Mission: Impossible and Fast and Furious franchises have all underperformed so badly as to give the impression of those franchises sputtering out altogether, and the Jack Ryan franchise spared that fate mainly by its having shifted to the small screen as a Netflix series years earlier (after, again, another underperformance by the 2015 film that represented a third reboot for the series).

The result is that a Bourne 6 is a very, very big gamble today. That doesn't mean that it won't happen--after all, Gladiator 2 happened (and went on to validate the predictions of the skeptics)--but the road to an actual film is likely to be long and rocky at best, the receipts disappointing, and if on a more modest scale than Gladiator 2, the result altogether a reminder that the fact that studio executives keep making losing bets on such films has absolutely nothing to do with the executives being slaves to consumer demand.