Universal Pictures has announced that it will forge ahead with plans for a fourth installment of the Jason Bourne saga due out in 2012, despite star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass remaining detached from the project. Damon has previously said that he would do the film, but only if Greengrass would return to direct. The pair most recently worked together on Green Zone, but have apparently not talked since, making them much like my parents, if Green Zone were child support payments.

Tony Gilroy will write the fourth film, and is also rumored to be a potential replacement for Greengrass in case he doesn’t sign on. According to Deadline, the film could be called The Bourne Bible, but according to Variety it will take on the name of the novel, “The Bourne Legacy”, although it would not be related to the plot of the written work. In related news, Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg will write and direct Still Bourne. Just kidding, that would actually sound funny.

Butcher the English language, Entertainment.ie:

The studio have reportedly commissioned the script for The Bourne Legacy, with original adaptor Tony Gilroy on writing duties, and a director and new star being sought.

Empire Magazine are speculating that Gilroy, who made a brilliant directorial debut with Michael Clayton, could be the man to call the shots on a new instalment. Channing Tatum for the lead? I wouldn’t bet against it.

Don’t worry, I know what you’re thinking and C-Tate couldn’t make it today, but it looks like he could have written that. The author just pulled Chan-Dogg’s name out of his butt, and Universal is still holding out hope that Damon will reprise his role for the fourth and presumably final Bourne film, which is slated to be successive, as opposed to a prequel. The addition of C-Tate would simply make no sense, unless Jason Bourne has to infiltrate working class Portland in order to overcome the final limitations of his amnesia – remembering how to pop and lock, for real, son.

But what if…

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The word around the campfire recently was that director Paul Greengrass had left the Bourne franchise, which was a shame considering he’d made only two Bourne sequels and one movie that looks exactly like Bourne.  Someone recently asked Matt Damon about it, and he had some shocking news.

“There’ll probably be a prequel of some kind with another actor and another director before we do another one,” he said, “just because I think we’re probably another five years away from doing it – we’ve got to get a script…” [Empire]

You heard it here, folks, Matt Damon thinks there’ll be a reboot. But he doesn’t really know.  It’ll probably be hard to tell anyway with these boring ass movies.  At this point they should just shoot the sequel with Damon’s part played by Tyler Perry in drag, just to see if anyone’s still paying attention.  Here, I think I found an early sneak peek at the next Bourne movie.

Check out the trailer for the Green Zone, from Bourne director Paul Greengrass, starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, and Brendan Gleeson.  So get this, bros: Matt Damon plays some sort of rogue government agent, and he’s trying to do right, but he’s on the run from some malevolent bureaucrat.  Slow down, Matt Damon, I don’t think the world is ready for you to play this kind of character.  Oh hello there, dismissive wanking motion, I didn’t even hear you come in.

Essentially true fact: Paul Greengrass calls his trailer “The Green Zone” and his favorite joke is to sock people in the stomach and then yell “Shoulda been wearin’ your body armor!”  It makes him laugh and laugh.

(Though Bourne’s brother considered himself a pacifist, they shared an affinity for scarves.)

(“Hello, Zack Morris?  I thought I told you not to call me here.”)

Green Zone seems like an odd choice for Paul Greengrass, since it looks a lot like The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, in which he also directed Matt Damon.  This one’s based on Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, an award-winning 2006 non-fiction book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, about the events between the end of the war and the surge and transfer of power to the Iraqis.  In the movie version:

Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller is a rogue U.S. Army officer who must hunt through covert and faulty intelligence hidden on foreign soil before war escalates in an unstable region.

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^{Historical accounts differ as to whether Blackbeard was “totally awesome” or “sorta faggy”}

Some new details about Blackbeard have hit the web.  It will be based on the life of Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard, a former British Naval captain who becomes a privateer (basically a captain licensed by a government to pirate other nation’s ships), who later becomes a full-on pirate, feared by all until he was captured, killed, and beheaded off of North Carolina by Lt. Robert Maynard in 1718.  Mania reports that Paul Greengrass (United 93, Bourne Ultimatum) is the lead candidate to direct. They offer some plot details:

Edward Teach is in the employ of Britain’s royal navy and fought for the queen in the War of Spanish Succession.  During that time he had a protege who served with him as his first mate.  When Britain withdrew from the war in the early 1700′s, many men of the royal navy were disavowed.  Teach, feeling betrayed and without a country to call his own, turned to piracy.  With many of his disavowed sea fairing comrades, he took a ship and using his honed skills and intimate knowledge of the navy’s shipping routes and pots, began exacting his revenge.

Becoming an increasing threat, the British navy directed Teach’s old protege, now a captain, to hunt down Blackbeard and put an end to his tyranny.  For the most part the story will be based on some truth but the protégé subplot is completely made up and, if successful, will be used again [I have no idea what "used again" means].

Sounds fairly paint by numbers, but as long as it has rum, cannons, rape, and swordfighting, I won’t be too upset. But if they make another pirate movie full of goddamned dancing skeletons, talking monkeys, and Orlando Bloom, I swear to God I’m going to rape Jerry Bruckheimer myself.  Okay, that wouldn’t make much sense.  Probably I’ll just get real mad and kick the coffee table and hop around my apartment on one foot. But I’m telling you, you would not want to be that coffee table.