Universal Pictures has announced a 25-film Blu-ray collection to commemorate the studio’s 100th anniversary, and it’s a genuinely great box set.  The “Universal 100th Anniversary Collection” includes 25 of the studio’s finest films, a 15-track music CD chock full of iconic film scores, a “100 Years of Universal” 72-page collector’s book and more.  Though the inclusion of HD versions of films like Dracula, Jurassic Park, The Sting, Back to the Future, Jaws, Do the Right Thing, and To Kill a Mockingbird alone would have been worth the purchase, the box set includes a number of vintage cartoons and shorts as well as a collection of featurettes covering the studio’s entire history.

The 25-disc Blu-ray set and 26-disc DVD collection (Schindler’s List is included in the DVD set only) will be available for a limited time starting November 6th.  A price has yet to be announced, but I don’t expect it’ll be cheap.  Hit the jump to read the full rundown of films and special features.

Yesterday it looked like Universal’s The Bourne Legacy might get as high as $45 million by the end of its first weekend. That was not to be; although the re-born Bourne did open to a very respectable $40.2 million from 3,745 locations. Also falling in the ‘respectable’ range with $27.4 million was The Campaign, starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis. The comedy did well enough from 3,204 locations to keep The Dark Knight Rises in third.

Considering the 2012 election cycle is currently in full swing, I feel compelled to lend my endorsement to a truly worthy candidate: The Campaign. As someone who unashamedly enjoys a majority of Will Ferrell‘s manchild cinematic escapades, I expected to like the pic. That said, I’m now putting The Campaign just behind Anchorman, Step Brothers, and Elf in my personal “Ferrell Top 4″: something I didn’t expect to be writing the day after seeing it. Sure, the film borrows a ton from Talladega Nights and Ferrell’s take on President Bush. It also manages to combine relevance, irreverence, and humor in a way many mainstream comedies can only promise and ultimately fail to deliver on.

Political endorsements aside, this week’s Top 5 contains a considerable share of The Bourne Legacy coverage, Joss Whedon returning to write/direct The Avengers 2, The Campaign interviews with Will Ferrell, Zach Galifianakis, and more, the first trailer and new poster for the Red Dawn remake, and the news that some of Bane’s backstory was left on The Dark Knight Rises‘ cutting room floor. A brief recap and link to each awaits after the jump.

The Bourne franchise is at a crossroads. Does the success of each movie depend on Matt Damon, or can Universal turn Bourne into Bond, an evergreen series that rotates in fresh blood every few movies? To explore that question, I tried to capture how the series has evolved over the last decade with Bourne by the Numbers. The feature provides a numbers-based snapshot of each movie and its place in the filmography by looking at the box office, critical reception, and miscellaneous facts.

Hit the jump for a comprehensive review of the Bourne movies, featuring The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Bourne Legacy.

Opening tomorrow is writer/director Tony Gilroy’s The Bourne Legacy.  For those unfamiliar with the franchise reboot, this time around, a government task force led by Edward Norton‘s character is assassinating all their genetically-modified assets to prevent another Bourne situation.  However, one member of the program, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), manages to escape with a scientist (Rachel Weisz), and the two go on the run for their lives.  The film also stars Oscar Isaac, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Albert Finney, Stacy Keach, Scott Glenn, Corey Stoll, and Donna Murphy.  For more on the film, here are five clips.

During the recent Los Angeles press day, I did an exclusive interview with producer Patrick Crowley.  If you’re a fan of the Bourne films and want to hear some great behind the scenes stories about all four movies, you’re in the right place.  During our extended conversation we talked about the making of Bourne Legacy, did they ever consider 3D, Easter Eggs, test screenings, will future Bourne movies have Bourne in the title, coming up with new and exciting action scenes, deleted scenes, reshoots,  and so much more.  Hit the jump for what he had to say.

[With The Bourne Legacy set to open this Friday, we'll be taking a look back at the original Bourne trilogy.  These reviews will contain spoilers since the movies have been out for years.  Click here for my review of The Bourne Identity.]

The identity of the Bourne franchise begins in the third act of The Bourne Identity.  It’s when the character’s strengths and weaknesses begin to arise, and The Bourne Supremacy director Paul Greengrass took note of where not only the character was going, but where America was going.  The Bourne Identity came out in June 2002, and the sense of our country’s post-9/11 world was still hazy.  By the time The Bourne Supremacy arrived on July 23, 2004, the reverberations were clear.  We had been led into a war based on faulty intelligence that was cherry-picked so that we could attack a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.  Greengrass wasn’t obligated to insert the subtext into his spy thriller, but he was savvy enough to leave the political commentary simmering underneath an intense action flick that not only boosted Matt Damon‘s credibility as a kick-ass hero, but found a way to use hand-held cinematography to its full effect rather than a lazy shortcut.

[With The Bourne Legacy set to open this Friday, we'll be taking a look back at the original Bourne trilogy.  These reviews will contain spoilers since the movies have been out for years.]

In the years following his breakthrough success with Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon‘s career had hit a snag.  He was a talented actor who had made a series of bad choices in terms of leading roles.  Furthermore, he had never taken on the role of an action hero, but Universal took a chance on the actor, and had him star in the thriller The Bourne Identity.  Director Doug Liman has also never done an action film before, and had made his name on the indie features Swingers and Go.  Strangely, neither the director nor his star does a particularly great job with the film, but it was a hit and led to two excellent features once Paul Greengrass took over the franchise.  I didn’t care much for The Bourne Identity when I saw it back when it was released in 2002.  I hadn’t revisited the movie until today, and unfortunately, it still has a lot of problems.  Thankfully, these problems then serve to illustrate what makes the character works and separates him from other action heroes.

If director Doug Liman gets his way, you should be hearing chants of “Attica! Attica!” everywhere you go in the near future. The director of Swingers, The Bourne Identity and other flicks is now moving into more serious territory with his eyes on directing a movie about the 1971 uprising at that New York state prison.

Working with a script from Precious:Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (man is that a long title) scribe Geoffrey Fletcher, Liman will re-create the four-day confrontation between prisoners and guards that capture the attention of the entire nation. For Liman, the project has a personal appeal, with his father, the late Arthur Liman, having served as chief counsel to the New York State Special Commission on Attica Prison and co-authored the commission’s report on the uprising.

Sounds like a perfect match of director and material to me. Hit the jump to hear more of what Liman had to say about the project and to find out what kind of spy games he’ll be getting up to even sooner.

Jason Bourne, a man born of the 1980s, undergoes a spot-on big screen update.  Matt Damon supplies the body and Doug Liman (Swingers, Go) and Paul Greenglass (United 93, Bloody Sunday) put it to work.  You should know, if someone offers you twenty thousand dollars to drive them somewhere, only do it if you want to fall in love with that irascible spy.  More after the jump: