Bourne, again

More Nakata and Asian horror news to come, but since it's prime shopping season, a brief word on today's sequel releases for holiday shoppers. Today on DVD we get Harry Potter 5, High School Musical 2, and The Bourne Identity 3.

Not much to talk about there. Potter's next installment is well in the works, as is High School Musical 3 - but the note that interests me is on Bourne. Back when the movie was about to release, I prepared and abandoned a post about Matt Damon stating that he was well done with it and had no interest in returning to the Bourne character. This was just before the film's release, at which point it made dough (a plenty solid $69 million opening weekend on the way to over $227 domestically and nearly that much again overseas), was lauded by critics, and Damon was knighted by Forbes magazine, using a complex series of equations, as the most profitable actor in Hollywood, delivering $29 in ticket sales for every $1 you pay him. The Bourne Ultimatum has a critic-based 93% and user-based 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, not only an impressive rating, but an incredibly slight discrepancy for a modern action movie.

Perhaps swayed by the attention, somewhere along the line Damon changed his stance on returning for a fourth Bourne film. To demonstrate:

"We have ridden that horse as far as we can." Damon in Variety, 5/24/07
"It wouldn't be the worst thing" Damon in The Guardian, 8/10/07
"Matt said to me, ‘Look, you hand me a great script, I'm in.'" Producer Frank Marshall in Coming Soon, 12/06/07

There are only three proper Bourne books (the fourth and fifth, The Bourne Legacy and The Bourne Betrayal, were written by sleazemeister Eric Van Lustbader), but as all three films primarily use material from the first installment, it seems moot.