From Deadline comes news that John Krasinski will be playing the title role in Jack Ryan, the upcoming Amazon series based on the popular Tom Clancy character, an investment broker turned CIA agent turned two-term President Of The United States turned all-purpose conservative fantasy. The series, produced by Michael Bay through his Platinum Dunes company, will presumably just focus on the CIA agent part, ignoring the merger of Iran and Iraq into a single state, the Ebola-based supervirus engineering by evil environmentalists, the war between Russia and China, and all of the other things that threatened the world in Clancy’s unstable Ryanverse in the 1990s and 2000s.
Krasinski previously starred in Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi, and is apparently keen to continue working with a filmmaker who generally lets actors do whatever they want as long as it looks cool. Lost’s Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland are also involved. Jack Ryan, introduced by Clancy his debut novel, The Hunt For Red October, has been memorably played by Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin, and less memorably by Ben Affleck and Chris Pine. The new series will not be based on Clancy’s increasingly deranged novel series, but will instead offer “a new contemporary take on the character in his prime as a CIA analyst / operative.” This was also the pitch for Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.