Kenneth Branagh In Talks To Direct Paramount’s Jack Ryan Reboot
Paramount has spent a couple years trying to engineer a new film based onTom Clancy’s characterJack Ryan, previously seen in films likeThe Hunt For Red OctoberandPatriot Games, where he was played by Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, respectively.
Chris Pine(Star Trek,This Means War) has been attached to play Ryan for quite some time, but the project has gone through aparade of writers, and even with directorJack Bender(Lost)attached, couldn’t quite get moving.Bender left the project recently, which left us wondering if it was going to go the way of the Cold War. But nowKenneth Branagh, who last worked with Paramount and Marvel Studios onThor, is in talks to direct the new Jack Ryan film.VultureandVarietyhave the announcement, with Vulture saying the film is actually calledJack Ryan. (We’ve previously heard provisional titles likeMoscow.) The site also has some explanation for the long delay in getting the film off the ground:
Something along those lines is basically what we had been assuming was the problem for some time: no one could figure out what movie they’re actually making, hence the long chain of screenwriters and rewrites.
SupposedlyDavid Koepp’s new draft has brought a lot of those desires together, and it is, as we’ve more or less known, a prequel that establishes Ryan anew. More to the point, it is a modern-day story. Regardless of what Koepp has done with the script, Branagh might be a good choice for the movie. Visually I’m not sure he’s got the right style, or at least the style I’d expect to see applied to a movie likeJack Ryan, but I do think he has the ability to pull together the various tonal and narrative impulses of star, producer and studio.
