10 Sacred Movie Franchises That Should Never Be Remade Or Rebooted

The Bourne Identity may have already been the subject of a two-part TV adaptation well over a decade before Doug Liman and Matt Damon got their hands on the property, but the decision to try and continue the franchise long after the conclusion of the original trilogy has only reinforced the notion that the first three movies are nigh-on untouchable when it comes to discussing some of the finest work that the espionage genre has ever seen.

Liman may have set the stage, but Paul Greengrass brought it to another level, with both Supremacy and Ultimatum establishing Bourne as cinema's most complex, well-rounded and bad-a** super-spy, which is no easy feat in territory shared with James Bond and Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt.

Things got a little shaky afterwards following Jeremy Renner's poorly-received Legacy, the eventual return of Greengrass and Damon for the solid-if-unnecessary Jason Bourne, and spinoff series Treadstone that was recently canceled after a single season.

Any returns to the well since 2007 have failed to recapture the formula, and with over $1.6bn at the box office it can't be ruled out that we'll see the amnesiac operative return to our screens in some form, but there's virtually no chance it would come anywhere close to recapturing the magic of the first three.