Just so we are clear, the new script by Wanted writers, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, will have nothing to do with James Harriot's novel, All Creatures Great and Small -- although it does make a little confusing since they have the same title. The Hollywood Reporter announced that the duo have signed to complete a script for Sony and Original Films producer, Neil Moritz. According to Brandt, he and Haas came up with the idea after securing a blind deal with Sony, and Creatures was the first project they wanted to pitch to the studio.

Creatures centers on a future where humans are vastly outnumbered by animals. Brandt describes a pretty bleak future for us bipeds in the script: "... where people are literally living in forts, and the animals are running free."

Universal first nabbed the rights to Robert Ludlum's The Sigma Protocol back in 2002, and announced its intention to go forward with the adaptation in early 2006. But it has the project languish since then, maybe so as not to cannibalize the audience for its own Bourne films. Now that Bourne has apparently entered the action movie pantheon, the studio is ready to put Sigma on the front burner. They've hired Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, hot commodities after the unqualified success of Iron Man, to write the screenplay. Several other screenwriters have already taken a stab at it, but Marcum and Holloway will start from scratch.

The Sigma Protocol involves a young banker who stumbles upon a conspiracy to manipulate the world economy and finds himself an assassination target. Accompanied by a beautiful intelligence agent, he globe-hops to solve the mystery and elude his pursuers.

You may recall that Marcum and Holloway are also attached to write a Highlander remake. According to The Hollywood Reporter, they'll be doing The Sigma Protocol first. No director, cast, or timeline has been announced, but Sigma joins three other Ludlum projects in active development -- The Chancellor Manuscript, to star Leonardo DiCaprio, The Matarese Circle, with Denzel Washington attached, and a fourth Bourne flick with Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass set to return.

The Bourne films are remarkable for making Ludlum's kind-of-silly (if entertaining) potboiler stories uncommonly classy, but I'd like to see one of these films embrace the silliness and really go over the top.

Sure, we're getting more Bourne, according to reports from February, but that doesn't mean we can't get more Robert Ludlum action thrills with a new leading man -- with or without more Jason Bourne. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the next leading Ludlum man will be played by Denzel Washington. There's a package creating buzz in studios that would bring the writer's The Matarese Circle to the big screen, with Washington attached to play Bradley Scofield and Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, who recently penned 3:10 to Yuma, attached to write the script.

As THR describes it, the film focuses on "two secret agents -- an American and a Russian -- who must work together to fight a mysterious group of killers known as the Matarese. The twist: The agents, Bradley Scofield and Vasili Taleniekov, have been nemeses for years, with each responsible for killing someone close to the other." I like that -- two men who have to come together when they have a really good and solid reason not to -- it's not just professional distaste, a stolen lover, or a battle of egos.

Most of the major studios have heard the pitch, but as of yet, none have bitten. I'm sure it will only be a matter of time. How could they say no?

Can an action film also be a work of art? That's one of the questions raised by The Bourne Ultimatum, Paul Greengrass's third installment in the thriller series starring Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, an ex-assassin on a mission to discover a personal history obliterated by amnesia and clouded by years on the run. Bourne's past memories are fragmentary; his present-tense instincts are rock-solid. He can't tell you his real name or hometown, but he can field-strip a gun without looking at it, find a way out of any trap, hotwire a car with less effort than it would take the owner to find, insert and turn the key. But these killing skills can't get him to the center of his shattered life -- who he was, what he did.

And The Bourne Ultimatum does have elements of art: Political and social resonance, visual and linguistic symbolism, references to the world the films have shown us and the world outside of it, rich characters with fully-developed personalities. It also has all the elements of the modern action thriller -- how'd-they-do-that stunt work, crazy-fast fight action, tautly-wound scene construction that culminates in moments that leave you breathless. The Bourne Ultimatum picks up precisely where The Bourne Supremacy (also directed by Greengrass) left off -- Bourne, wounded and alone, is in Moscow. He's just atoned to the daughter of two of his victims -- killed not in the name of national security or the public good, but rather for private gain. Bourne's work was a secret -- but Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), a journalist for The Guardian has been running pieces about Bourne's work and Treadstone, the black ops group he worked for. Bourne would like to know who Ross's source is. So would the people who are trying to re-start Treadstone under the new name Blackbriar, to make it "... the sharp end of the stick ..." in America's arsenal.

In franchise-mad modern Hollywood, it's become a tradition unto itself: Whenever you have a new installment of a series coming to theaters, the prior films will be re-released on DVD. With The Bourne Ultimatum hitting theaters August 3rd, Universal's released a three-disc set, The Bourne Files, that collectively packages The Bourne Identity (2002) and The Bourne Supremacy (2004) along with a new disc of extras. There are two questions raised by any set like this -- namely, 'Do the films hold up?' and 'Are the extras worth it?'

The first question's easily answered: Yes. The Bourne films were perfectly-timed: James Bond, our number-one screen icon of espionage action, had descended into a sickly morass of high-tech high camp that made his adventures closer to the high-flying exploits of Batman or Wonder Woman (Die Another Day's invisible car, for example) than the down-to-the-ground espionage action of the character's roots. Directed by Doug Liman from a script by Tony Gilroy, The Bourne Identity was so grim and gray and wrapped in cynicism that it immediately stood out in contrast against the bright, light gloss of the Bond series. The Bourne Identity started with a hook that stuck for the duration of the film: A man is pulled from the sea. He has no memory. He wants to find out who he is. He learns that he was not necessarily a good person -- and that others want him dead. Played by Matt Damon, Jason Bourne wasn't a bulletproof superhero; he was a human being with armed with instincts and training and pure will, capable of doing whatever was required to survive.

Robert Ludlum is quite the hot property in Hollywood these days - it's just too bad that he's not around to enjoy his own success. In addition to being used as the sources for the wildly popular (not to mention totally awesome) Bourne series, his novels have recently been picked up for a TV miniseries and the upcoming Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle, The Chancellor Manuscript. And, just this morning, The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Universal - the home of the Bourne films - has acquired up yet another book for adaptation.

The Sigma Protocol is about an American economist who finds himself targeted for assassination. "When a U.S. intelligence agent investigating his case finds herself discredited, the two end up on the run and uncover a vast multinational conspiracy manipulating the global economy and world events." Sweet - vast multinational conspiracies are box office gold. The movie will be written and directed by Venezuela's Jonathan Jakubowicz, whose feature work to this point  - including last year's Secuestro Express, which was his home country's highest grossing film of all time - has all been in Spanish.

Though no timeline for the film has yet been set, it's safe to assume that late 2006/early 2007 is going to feature a whole lotta Ludlum.