When news came that Chris Pine is (maybe) the new Jack Ryan, all I could think of was that he’s just not a big enough star. Sure, he was in a hit movie this summer, but Star Trek is not enough to propel anybody into stardom. Should William Shatner have gone on to play Indiana Jones after Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Of course not. Nobody would have seen that. Okay, I would have definitely seen that, but not for positive reasons.
The thing about the Jack Ryan character is he’s kind of boring, so he needs someone like Harrison Ford to play him. Or, it has to be made at a time when adults go to see good movies like The Hunt for Red October without need for a big star (though Sean Connery’s face didn’t hurt that film). I liked The Sum of All Fears okay, but not even a semi star like Ben Affleck could carry it sufficiently. I don’t buy that Pine can carry the next one.
Unless he has help and the trust of the studio. For the character to work, Paramount needs to find an actor who they’ll stick with and who will stick with the role. Otherwise moviegoers are not going to think of it as a familiar franchise. With only four films the Jack Ryan series is already gaining quickly on the number of actors that played James Bond, to whom Ryan should be looking up. Ryan should be like the domestic answer to 007 and should equivalently have an iconic look, some trademarks (a kind of vehicle and favorite drink, for example) and maybe even a catchphrase.
I know, this all sounds like bad news, mainly because such things shouldn’t be forced or they’re liable to be corny. But if there’s no writers smart enough to make it work they should just abandon it.
Let’s see what other film bloggers think of the casting after the jump:
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Both are broadly classifiable as science fiction, but Alien is basically a horror flick and Aliens has all the conventions of a war film. That’s a pretty slick transition from one type of movie to another, especially since the switch was so immediate within the series. Most movie franchises don’t play with genre in such a way until they’ve gone through a number of sequels, and even then the series usually just simply takes its characters into outer space, a la Moonraker, Jason X and Leprechaun 4.
Genre jumping isn’t that easy, though, unless a franchise inhabits a whole universe in which to expand through. Like Star Wars, for example. Originally a film series, the Star Wars franchise spread out into novels, which has allowed for dips into the romance genre and now horror. That’s right, an upcoming novel by horror author Joe Schreiber, titled Deathtroopers, takes the Star Wars universe into frightening territory described by Schreiber as “in the vein of The Shining and Alien, with a little dose of William Gibson mixed in.”
So, if Star Wars can venture into the horror genre, what other movie franchises should attempt a genre jump? To toy with the idea, we’ve selected five film series in need of a change and suggested a possible redirection of genre for each.
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Forget about Don Cheadle replacing Terence Howard as James Rhodes / War Machine in Iron Man II, which smells a lot like the “we’ll threaten to replace Tobey Maguire with Jake Gyllenhaal” tactic that Sony used for Spider-Man II –– Hollywood has been doing this for years. It was bad enough back in the days of television with Dick Sargent replacing Dick York in Bewitched, but now it’s becoming pretty commonplace for producers to replace actors in iconic roles. Although now it’s more common due to monetary concerns, which seems to be what has taken Howard out of the War Machine suit, it’s also common to see an actor ankle a role because they don’t like the source material, or the direction the character is taking. We’ve put together several different re-castings, which all happened for a variety of reasons: money, dissatisfaction with the script, test audience reactions, and actors just growing tired of playing the same character. Check them out after the break.
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After reading the news that Paramount has tapped Sam Raimi to revive the Jack Ryan franchise (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears), I had one thought: who could have predicted this? And then I quickly had another thought: didn’t Paramount already attempt to youngify this character?
Regarding my first thought, I believe the Fark.com subby snarked it best by presuming “Jack Ryan might be wielding a chainsaw in his next film.” Sure, the joke is a bit obvious, and a bit outdated now that Raimi has done three very tame Spider-Man flicks, but the guy did manage to slip a chainsaw in the second (aka the best) installment with that terrific horror-homaging surgery sequence. So, perhaps it’s not even a joke; maybe Ryan will wield a chainsaw. The better — because it’s less plausible — joke would be to speculate that Ryan will be fighting skeletal terrorists (I didn’t say it was the funnier joke).
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