Universal just paid a ton to become Jason Bourne's Forever Home

Bourne has operated in the NBCUniversal orbit for more than two decades at this point, ever since Universal handled North American distribution for Matt Damon’s The Bourne Identity back in 2002. The series has since stayed in-house ever since, through the original three Damon movies, rights-extender The Bourne Legacy, and revival project Jason Bourne—to say nothing of Treadstone, the USA Network series that ran for three short months in 2019. But six fallow years had apparently allowed the rights to lapse back to Ludlum’s family, who reportedly took offers on the rights from various money folks, “including two from streamers, one from another major studio and a few entrepreneurial ventures.” The estate then reportedly took their newly established price tag back to NBCUniversal, which agreed to pay it to keep the franchise in-house—forever, apparently, as the company announced today that it had picked up the rights in perpetuity.

We don’t know how much money Universal dropped on re-acquiring the package, but it does raise obvious questions about what they plan to do with them: As we noted before, the sole attempt to franchise the series out into TV only made it to a single season, and everything after the end of the original trilogy has struggled. (2016’s Jason Bourne was technically the highest-grossing film in the franchise, but $415 million at the box office, off of a $120 million budget, isn’t the kind of performance that has executives immediately clamoring for more—and that’s before you take into account the critical dings it took.) It’s possible, of course, that it’s as simple as no one wanting to have to rebrand or rename The Jason Bourne Stuntacular at Universal Studios Orlando—although we have to imagine that probably would have been cheaper than shelling out undisclosed-but-massive amounts of money in order to hold on to the rights.