10 All-Time Great Franchises That Still Had One Bad Movie

Matt Damon must have agreed to return as cinema's favorite amnesiac super-spy after a decade in 2016's Jason Bourne because he didn't want the franchise's swansong to be a major disappointment that he wasn't even involved in.

Released during that brief period in history when Hollywood toyed with the idea of making Jeremy Renner the industry's next major action star, The Bourne Legacy would probably have enjoyed a better reputation if it was released as a standalone espionage thriller instead of awkwardly stuffing itself into the franchise's established mythology and wasting one hell of an ensemble cast in the process.

All the talk of chems quickly became tiresome, and without the urgency of Paul Greengrass' direction the action sequences possessed little of the bone-crunching excitement that had come to define the series' signature set-pieces, and the final product was almost monotonously pedestrian and workmanlike as a result.