These are some new photos of Matt Damon outside of Comic-Con this weekend. I’m also including some photos of Jeremy Renner at LAX, also this past weekend. Damon and Renner… two wonderful actors, one exiting the Jason Bourne franchise and one entering it. Remember, in the January issue of GQ this year, Matt made some rather pointed (some would argue “bitchy”) comments about the franchise, about screenwriter Tony Gilroy, and about why he walked away from the massively successful, career-defining franchise – go here to review his comments. What was nice about Matt’s brutal honesty (or his brutal bitchiness) is that he seemed to genuinely hope that Jeremy Renner would succeed as a completely new spy/assassin in The Bourne Legacy – Matt seems to genuinely like Renner, and wish him well. Anyway, while Matt was at Comic-Con to promote his sci-fi film Elysium, he ended up fielding a lot of questions about Bourne.

Matt Damon may be attending (his first!) Comic-Con to promote the super secret sci-fi flick Elysium, but that doesn’t mean rabid fans of the Bourne trilogy aren’t wondering whether Jason Bourne himself won’t return to the action franchise at some point in the future.

“No, I mean, I think everyone wants to see how this one does,” Matt told us exclusively when we asked whether there was talk of him returning for a fifth film. So how does Matt think Jeremy Renner will do carrying on his legacy?

“I’ve only seen the trailer. But he looks great in it,” Damon revealed about his successor. “When Paul Greengrass [director of Bourne Ultimatum and Supremacy] and I were talking about potentially doing a fourth one years ago and then handing it off to someone, Renner was the guy we talked about because I’m a huge fan of his. I think he’s great. And I think he fits really well in that world, like, I really believe him in that world. So I think he’ll be terrific.”

Which only means that if the two were to team up the result would be even more terrific.

“I think the movie will be really good. Tony [Gilroy] is really smart, he’s a really good writer and a really good director and I’m sure he made a good movie,” Matt explained to us. “The question will be if they can franchise that movie, because if they can, then they’ll be done with me. They’ll just keep making those.”

After the billion-dollar success Renner had kicking butt in The Avengers, we have a feeling things might just work out for him on this go, too. Guess we’ll have to wait and see if Matt changes his mind someday.

And since this is Comic-Con, where superheroes reign supreme, we asked Damon why we haven’t seen him donning a cape or cowl on the big screen.

“I always kind of viewed Bourne a little bit as a superhero, or antihero character, so I kind of got my hit doing those for those years,” he responded. “Daredevil was always the one Ben [Affleck] and I grew up reading, we loved Daredevil, but Ben got that one.”

Matt continues, “It’s like a sci-fi movie, they’re hard to do really well and when they’re done well, often times, look at The Dark Knight, it’s just a stellar, incredible seriesa—but they had a great actor playing Batman already. There wasn’t anything for me to do. So when the roles do come around that are really great—when Iron Man comes around, that’s Downey—there wasn’t any part for me. Maybe there’s some superhero left over that I can play someday.”

Just don’t ask him to do a reboot (got that, Team Daredevil?)

“I don’t think I could do a reboot. The reboots are happening so fast now,” he griped. “The new Spider-Man comes out 10 years after the first one, that’s kind of crazy. But it works. People seem to want to see those movies. So I think we’re going to have a steady diet of them for a little while.”

For those keeping score at home, that’s Bourne sequels: 0, superhero movie: maybe!

[From E! News]

I think Matt was being honest – this is the guy, after all, who says “yes” to whatever dumb stunt Jimmy Kimmel wants to pull and this is guy who appears in, like, ESPN commercials. If The Bourne Legacy does well and they want Matt to come in and do something with Renner for another film, Matt probably would. But I think Damon is being realistic with the “The question will be if they can franchise that movie, because if they can, then they’ll be done with me. They’ll just keep making those” – if Renner and The Bourne Legacy are successful, then why would they need to pay Matt Damon $20 million for anything, you know? So… whatever happens, I think we just need to understand that Matt will probably never play Jason Bourne again. Which isn’t the worst thing, really – the original trilogy really holds up.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet and Pacific Coast News.