One of the most perplexedly long-lasting franchises in Hollywood has been Paramount’s adaptations of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series. Ever since “The Hunt for Red October” in 1989 (easily the best of the bunch and the only one worth revisiting), the studio has been cranking out the faintly dull, mostly rote, spy thrillers in order to give something for your dad to see at the movies, with mostly diminishing returns. Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck have all played modern cinema’s least interesting recurring character, and Paramount have been trying for some time to resurrect the franchise, with Sam Raimi and Fernando Mereilles both being attached at different times.
Eventually, it was announced last year that Chris Pine would be playing Ryan in a new version, one not based on a Clancy novel, but instead from a script originally by Hossein Amini (“The Wings of the Dove”). Relative newcomer Adam Cozad has been rewriting Amini’s script, and Pajiba, whose scooping record is pretty much impeccable at this point, have managed to find out a few details on the project. Apparently using the working title “Moscow,” the film will follow Ryan in his 20s, coming out of the Marines to work in the finance world (in Clancy’s novels, the character worked for Merill Lynch before joining the C.I.A.).
In the new version, Ryan works in the titular city for a Russian billionaire, who sets him up as a fall guy for a terrorist plot to destabilize the U.S. economy (an evil billionaire who seems not to have noticed he’s a couple of years late with that one… that is unless this one’s going to be a prequel set before the 1980s, but we assume it’ll have a rebooted, modern timeline) and Ryan is forced to go on the run to clear his name and rescue his kidnapped wife. Interestingly, the script seems to borrow heavily from the spec script that made Cozad’s name, “Dubai,” which made the 2007 Black List, and had Eric Bana attached to star for some time. We read that spec script, which followed an American economist in Dubai who is, yes, made the fall guy for a terrorist plot to destabilize the U.S. economy. Familiar? “Dubai” didn’t seem to be able to decide whether it was a “Syriana”-style geo-political thriller, or a Michael Bay action movie (there was a ludicrous action sequence where the economist rampages through the city streets in a huge Caterpillar dump truck), so hopefully Cozad’s straightened out the tone in the intervening years.
Incidentally, It wouldn’t be the first time that a spec script’s been repurposed for a franchise; “Die Hard With A Vengeance” started out as a John McClane-free script by writer Jonathan Hensleigh entitled “Simon Says,” while George Nolfi’s script “Honor Among Thieves” was turned into “Ocean’s Twelve.”