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Insidery

Universal Delays Bourne Legacy, Baldfacedly Admits It’s Because of The Avengers

by Susana Polo | 4:01 pm, June 24th, 2012


Back when Paramount announced that it would be postponing the release of G.I. Joe: Retaliation nine entire months, ostensibly to retrofit it with 3D and reshoot some scenes, we raised our eyebrows suspiciously. Hollywood is sort of reeling from the success of The Avengers, because while it means great things for Marvel Studios and everyone else involved in the production, it’s kind of sucking the life out of the rest of the summer blockbuster season.

See, the thing about The Avengers is not that it had a huge spike in attention, made a bunch of money, and then got out of the way for the next batch of action blockbusters. It’s sitting around, the 800 pound gorilla and the unexpected houseguest all in one. Which brings us to Universal’s press release on why they’ve delayed the latest installment of their highly successful Bourne franchise.

Just as The Avengers demonstrated marketplace sustainability that well outpaced traditional patterns earlier this summer, the industry expects a similar trajectory for The Dark Knight Rises [releasing July 20th]. Moving one week further from its release will give The Bourne Legacy [originally releasing August 3rd] an even greater opportunity to maximize its opening box office potential. Moving to August 10 will also allow us to extend valuable promotion for the film across all NBCUniversal platforms during the Olympics, which will dominate television and digital audiences beginning July 27. We are excited about this new chapter in our Bourne franchise and confident that August 10 is the right date for our film and for our industry as a whole.

So, straight from Universal Studios: movies in The Avengers‘ demographic space that might otherwise have opened #1 at the box office are taking the hit from consumers who are still choosing The Avengers over other movie fare. Just a few weeks ago I was perfectly in this boat: when given a choice between seeing Men in Black 3, which against all expectations was reviewing quite favorably, and seeing The Avengers again, I chose The Avengers.

Of course, aside from The Avengers and The Dark Knight, there is one more elephant in the room for Universal. And that’s Battleship, which, even though it premiered two weeks after The Avengers, still didn’t manage to pull anything like the numbers a big, explodey alien movie would have been projected to. Once bitten, twice shy, Universal is not going to be putting another of it’s assumed-guaranteed blockbusters out two weeks after a highly anticipated superhero movie.

(via Deadline.)

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  • http://twitter.com/cosmo111687 Andres

    Men in Black 3 was actually better than The Avengers. You should’ve gone and seen it.

  • Anonymous

    They should market The Bourne Legacy as a Hawkeye prequel. I would watch it.

    Nevermind the lawsuits!

  • Anonymous

    Haha, nice one. You know what was even better then Avengers? Transformers 2. No i’m kidding Avengers kicked ass or all of the above movies.

  • Anonymous

    This article shows how bad hollywoods got at the moment, that a rather average movie like Avengers is kicking the ass of every other current release. Don’t get me wrong, i loved Avengers, but it wasn’t exactly ground breaking: It had special effects comparable to other alien movies, it had writing equiviliant to other character pieces & it had super heroes like any other comic book movie. Any aspect of it is pretty average, but they combined into a great movie, because Hollywood these days doesn’t seem to be able to develop a single movie with 1 of the above qualities, let alone all three.

    So yeah, i’m setting the minimum standard for an average movie as “Avengers.” If you aren’t at least as good as avengers on even a technical level, you’ve failed at making a good movie.

  • http://twitter.com/cosmo111687 Andres

    I don’t know if you’ve seen MiB3 or not, but you should if you haven’t. It’s actually pretty good. Avengers is good too, but it was just a bunch of action. MiB3 actually had some touching moments in it.

  • http://twitter.com/cosmo111687 Andres

    Also, please try to be a little less snarky to people who are just offering their opinion.

  • Anonymous

    actually i have seen it & i’ve got to say it was terrible.

  • Anonymous

    That wasn’t snark, that was an attempt at irony. Fact is that MIB3 was terrible. To put Avengers & MIB3 in the same category is like putting a genius in the same category as a brick & declaring the brick to have a higher IQ.

    MIB3 was not funny, it wasn’t well scripted, well acted, or even very clever. Heck even the special effects & action scenes were pretty mediocre.

    One was the conclusion to an interesting experiment, whhile also being the opening of a new era of storytelling for Marvel, while also simultaneously being a good movie.

    The other was not only a pretty pedistrian movie in its own rights, it also messed up the prior movies limited characterisation.

    Thats not opinion, thats pretty much established fact at this point.

  • Carmen Sandiego

     MIB had some touching moments, but I felt like it was too predictable and was targeting audiences much, much younger than its PG-13 rating would have you believe.  Avengers just seemed to have more vivacity, some unpredictability, and a really strong cast.

  • Life Lessons

    Oh good grief. Ya’ know if they started advertising that Hawkeye was in Bourne they might get even more people. 

  • http://draw2much.deviantart.com/ Nicole Kiser

    I’m partly wondering if the reason The Avengers was so popular was the build up that’s been going on for years. Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America all did very well (We’ll just ignore the Hulk, m’kay? ;) ) and were cleverly linked together and kept hinting at some bigger plot. By the time The Avengers came out most people knew the characters, knew that movies associated with these characters are generally good, and if they’re great on their own they must be good together, right?

    I could be totally off base. I just know it’s easier for “the masses” to get into a movie like The Avengers when they already got some idea of who the characters are and why it’s worth being invested in what they’re doing.

    It makes me wonder if Hollywood will try to imitate this kind of formula in the future….

  • Anonymous

    good news for jeremy renner, which is good news for us…AMIRIGHT,LADIES?

  • Anonymous

    God i hope Hollywood doesn’t follow that formula… The last thing we need is further hymoginisation in the industry.

  • http://draw2much.deviantart.com/ Nicole Kiser

    I just can’t imagine they won’t. Hollywood management is filled with businessmen who think art and creativity can be distilled down into a formula that can be repeated over and over again with the same result. They disdain anything that doesn’t fit their world view or hasn’t already been proven to be a successful. On top of that, they’re highly competitive in the wrong way (they view success and failure *only* in terms of money, rather than the quality of product they’re producing and/or the reputation of their business).

    I found this out from a dude I know who works in Hollywood (though mostly the TV side of things). After talking with him, I finally understood why good shows constantly get cancelled on TV (it’s not an audience thing, it’s that the studio.management doesn’t like the show and goes out of it’s way to kill it) and why women don’t get represented very well in Hollywood (too many men with a narrow-minded understanding of how women work… and men too, now that I think about it).

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