Universal Pictures has long had the sequel scheduled for August 3rd, a date it shared with Total Recall, the big-budget remake from director Len Wiseman.  While two big summer movies opening on the same day isn't at all unusual, that both The Bourne Legacy and Total Recall are high profile actioners targeting a more or less identical audience.  By dropping on the same Friday, both films were basically looking at mutually-assured destruction, or at the very least, mutually-assured detriment.  So we've been waiting to see whether Universal or Sony would blink and opt for a different date.

That's not all, though.  The hype-machine for Christopher Nolan's trilogy-capper The Dark Knight Rises is in full effect over at Warner Bros., and at this point, the question isn't if that sequel will be a massive hit, but just how massive a hit it will be.  The film is set to hit theaters on July 20th, and considering how The Avengers held the box office in a headlock for multiple weekends, Universal figures that a little extra distance from the Caped Crusader is a good thing. 

That's not all, though.  That extra week will give Universal more time to advertise The Bourne Legacy during the London Summer Olympics.  The games will be broadcast across NBCUniversal's Comcast subsidiaries, allowing the studio to maximize awareness of the fourth movie inspired by the espionage novels of Robert Ludlum.

Universal's official announcement of the new release date spells all this out, but there's also a little bit more going on here:

“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. Moving one week further from its release will give The Bourne Legacy 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.”

To assuage any concerns about The Bourne Legacy not living up to its predecessors, Deadline reports that test screenings of the film have gone exceedingly well.  Response to the trailers has generally been positive online, as well.  Earlier this month, specifically from June 8th-14th, the production underwent some reshoots in Vancouver.  Director Tony Gilroy, who contributed to the scripts for all three previous Bourne movies, was not on hand for that additional photography, which was overseen by second unit director and stunt coordinator Dan Bradley.  None of this, however, is unusual.  The other Bourne movies utilized some reshoots, as well, and in all likelihood, this time it involved exclusively action shooting, in which case there's no reason for Gilroy to be present.  Bradley served as second unit director and stunt coordinator on The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, so he knows what he's doing.  In action films on this scale, its usually the second unit director who handles all the stuff going boom and whatnot.

Universal naturally played down the entirely routine additional photography, saying it was, "two days of pickups. There was one shot that we needed to get. It was a beat. It was nothing.”

Anyways, two-time Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner takes over as Aaron Cross, a new government assassin who goes rogue when the events of The Bourne Ultimatum cause his handlers to liquidate the program that created him.  Returning from previous installments are actors David Strathairn, Joan Allen, Paddy Considine, Corey Johnson, and Albert Finney.  Newcomers joining Renner include Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Oscar Isaac, Donna Murphy, and Corey Stoll.