Bourne is back.
Well, kind of.
Universal’s The Bourne Legacy hit theaters Friday and is expected earn around $30 million—or more—during its opening weekend.
The reboot hopes to ride the wave of popularity from the previous action-packed Bourne films, which starred Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, an agent from a project called “Treadstone,” which developed deadly assassins.
The first three films in the franchise—The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)—were all hugely successful, raking in more than $100 million each. The Bourne Ultimatum surged to the top in ’07, earning more than $225 million at the box office.
Five years later, Universal is hoping to match, or exceed, the success that Ultimatum had at the theaters.
To help in that cause, the studio decided to bring in Jeremy Renner to play the role of a new agent, Aaron Cross, who appears to be another lethal government agent trained under a secret spy program.
Joining Renner in the reboot are Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach and Oscar Isaac.
Renner has been busy in recent years. He’s also starred in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, The Hurt Locker, The Town, and The Avengers.
So he’s used to some fisticuffs in movies.
Reviews started trickling in the week leading up to the movie’s release and they were mixed.
Only 52 percent of reviews on the movie-rating site Rotten Tomatoes were favorable. But 70 percent of the audience thought the movie should receive high marks.
