The trailer for The Bourne Ultimatum, the next installment of the Jason Bourne series, is of course out, along with the long-lead television ads and the billboards somewhat strangely pitching the movie’s tag (“On August 3, Jason Bourne comes home”) but with no mention of its title. I guess I say strangely because it’s still hard to think about the sleeper hit of summer 2002 as now being its own sort of instantly recognizable franchise. A spry melding of up-to-date aesthetic and worldview, hand-to-hand combat, and a narrative that dovetails perfectly with its protagonist’s panicky quest for self-actualization, The Bourne Identity has an awful lot to do with James Bond’s Casino Royale reinvention than most mainstream audiences might think. The TV ads for The Bourne Ultimatum are so-so, with David Strathairn as the new barker of orders, to Joan Allen’s returning witness of Bourne’s squirrelly escapability, but the long-form trailer hints at a full temporal memory awakening, as well as featuring some kick-ass car chase bits.

Fiscally, look for a slight uptick on the worldwide grosses of the first two films, which made $213 and $290 million, respectively. A big part of that will be eaten into by a budget that reportedly almost doubled from The Bourne Supremacy, however. Stealing away from his work on the third film, director Paul Greengrass made a special trip to the Los Angeles Film Critics Association dinner this past January to accept Best Director honors for his work on United 93 (his only awards season appearance), and he appeared a bit haggard, to be honest. Granted, a trans-Atlantic flight will help do that to you, but there were other problems born of the movie’s staggered shooting schedule and many locations.

In other news, as part of its promotional campaign for The Bourne Ultimatum, Universal is teaming up with Google for “The Ultimate Search for Bourne,” kicking off on July 16. Using various Google tools to track Bourne across various continents, contestants will make themselves eligible for a variety of prizes, including a bag full of phony passports. No, just kidding about that last part…