Jack Ryan receives an approximate release date and trilogy talk

We’ve been writing about JACK RYAN in some form or another since Sam Raimi was involved all the way back in 2008, and we’ll be writing about for many months yet to come as the newly-announced tentative release date for the reboot of Tom Clancy’s character currently sits at “4th Quarter 2013.”  While we may never know for sure, I suspect that this has as much to do with the way scheduling works out as with the successful precedent set down by the December release of Paramount’s own MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL.

As we’ve been writing about JACK RYAN since ’08, you may wonder just what was going on to delay it so.  There were a few shenanigans insofar as bringing different writers in goes, but the main thing was that once talk of a trilogy became a real possibility Paramount elected to wait until Pine had finished shooting STAR TREK 2 before commencing filming on JACK RYAN.  This delay led to the loss of original director Jack Bender (“Lost”), who has since been replaced by the rather interesting choice of Kenneth Branagh (he’s also be playing the villain).

Compounding all of this is the casting of Kevin Costner as a character rather in the vein of Nick Fury who will not only serve as mentor to both Pine’s Jack Ryan and John Kelly, the main character in the Christopher McQuarrie-directed WITHOUT REMORSE that may or may not star Tom Hardy, but who will also in time receive his own movie.  A great deal of effort is being made to craft a connected universe here, no doubt with trilogy profits on the brain for WITHOUT REMORSE as well, so it will be very interesting to see how this all shakes out.

Considering the tentative release date for JACK RYAN is only a year and a half away, expect to hear more news coming out of the production soon.  Does this new “Tom Clancy Expanded Universe” concept have creative possiblity in your eyes, or do you think that the AVENGERS-style approach is just an unnecessary cash grab?

Keira Knightley is playing Ryan’s wife.  I’m very excited for all the pictures I’ll now be able to run of her.