Matt Damon in The Bourne UltimatumImage via Universal Pictures
2026 has been a career year for Matt Damon, and while the first movie that comes to people’s minds is The Odyssey, and rightfully so, he does have other projects this year worth noting. Back in January, Damon starred in one of the most-watched Netflix movies of the year in The Rip, which co-stars his long-time collaborator and friend Ben Affleck. The duo have been working together for over 30 years now, and they’re poised to be remembered as one of the all-time great Hollywood duos by the end of their careers. Damon then reunited with Christopher Nolan for the third time in his career with the aforementioned historical epic, which is now the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time. Damon is also being eyed as a hefty favorite to win Best Lead Actor for his performance as Odysseus in the film.
Matt Damon comes from the same generation of actors as Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg, but the trio have had wildly different careers. Most would agree that DiCaprio is the best actor of the bunch, and he’s also received the most awards recognition, while Wahlberg has starred in more big-budget action thrillers. However, neither star has a franchise under their belt like Jason Bourne, which may be what Damon is best remembered for at the end of his career. Damon has starred in four Jason Bourne movies that have been absent from streaming for a while now, until this week. In less than 48 hours, on October 1, all four of Damon’s Jason Bourne movies are officially premiering on Netflix, where they’re expected to stream for at least two or three months.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
01
How does a room know you’ve walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.
05
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very tranquil. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you hazardous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the hazardous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Die Hard invented the up-to-date action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely entertaining about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
Is Matt Damon Making Another ‘Jason Bourne’ Movie?
Matt Damon confirmed on the press tour for The Odyssey that he’s working on another Jason Bourne movie, but that the script is still being ironed out right now. At this stage in his career, Damon is less likely to just jump in and say yes to a modern Jason Bourne than he was 20 years ago — now, he wants to make sure the movie is going to be good before spending the time and money making it. If the script gets up to par, though, the film could be released sometime in the next few years.
Check out the Jason Bourne movies on Netflix this week and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of Matt Damon’s future projects.
Release Date
July 29, 2016
Runtime
123 minutes
Director
Paul Greengrass
Producers
Frank Marshall, Gregory Goodman, Matt Damon, Jeffrey M. Weiner
