The gestating reboot of the Jack Ryan franchise has been moving in along in fits and starts. Here’s what we know so far: Chris Pine will star, “Lost” director Jack Bender joined the project last summer, and that hire was soon followed by the signing on of Anthony Peckham (“Invictus,” “Sherlock Holmes“) to write the script with the ambitious plan of a late 2010/early 2011 start being eyed. Looks like they’ll have to put that last one on hold for now.
Deadline reports that the very hot writer of the moment Steve Zaillian has been tapped to give the script a rewrite. Zaillian has been very busy recently having penned the rewrite-rewrite of “Moneyball” and scripted “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” which led to him make a deal to do the same on “The Girl Who Played with Fire.” He also came aboard to pen the remake of of the 2007 Spanish-language time travel flick, “Timecrimes.” And oh yeah, he also wrote “The Irishman,” sometimes referred to as “I Heard You Paint Houses,” a mob drama that Martin Scorsese will likely do next after “Hugo Cabret” and that will reunite him with Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and perhaps more notably will see him team with Al Pacino for this first time.
Zaillian is now the fourth screenwriter to take on the script — Adam Cozad and Hossein Amini also took stabs it — but he’s no stranger to the franchise. He wrote “Clear And Present Danger” and reportedly did an uncredited rewrite on “Patriot Games.” Lorenzo di Bonaventura is still on board to produce, and the story won’t be based on any of Tom Clancy‘s books. Plot details remain under wraps but early last year, it was said to center on Ryan as a young, pre-CIA economist who is framed by a villainous Russian billionaire attempting to attack the US economy. That seems a little too tiredly topical and Deadline suggests that the script might take a page out of “The Hunt For Red October” with the plot circling around “a terrifying helicopter crash that nearly killed Ryan when he was a 23-year old platoon leader in the US Marines. He was the only member of the platoon to survive.”
Everyone is still hoping to get the film in front of cameras this year but we would imagine that would be a late 2011 start at best as Chris Pine will start shooting “Star Trek 2” sometime this summer.