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EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Pictures has scrapped a tentative plan for Chris Pine to resuscitate the Jack Ryan franchise before he reprises his James T. Kirk role in a Star Trek sequel. The slow process of nailing the Ryan script has prompted the studio to focus on getting Pine at the helm of the USS Enterprise first, even as the studio waits to see if JJ Abrams will reprise as Trek director.
This comes after the Ryan picture suffered another creative setback. Steve Zaillian, who wrote the 1994 Ryan film Clear and Present Danger and did uncredited rewrite work on Patriot Games, made a deal last month to rewrite the reboot script but had a change of heart and withdrew within the last two weeks. The studio has begun interviewing other writers. Lost‘s Jack Bender is still aboard to direct, but he isn’t pay or play and could walk. Lorenzo di Bonaventura is producing. Ryan was created by Tom Clancy in his bestselling book series, but the new film is an origin story that started with screenwriter Hossein Amini. Paramount then acquired the Adam Cozad spec script Dubai and hired Cozad to redraft it to be the Ryan relaunch. Anthony Peckham then came on to do a pass, and then Cozad was brought back to a project that by then was being called Moscow. The launching point of the film is one that gets a mention in Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, in the book and the original film that starred Alec Baldwin. It has to do with a terrifying helicopter crash that nearly killed Ryan when he was a 23-year old platoon leader in the US Marines. He was the only member of the platoon to survive. Insiders tell me that an OK version of Ryan could have been put into production this year, but the priority is more about launching a new franchise then filling a release slot.
Paramount’s expectation is for the Star Trek sequel to start production by the fall so that the studio can keep that film’s projected June 29, 2012 release date. Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Damon Lindelof are are working on the script.
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Scripts usually come out great when a thousand writers work on them. Even better when a studio takes an original spec and tries to make it fit into an already established idea by, you know, changing the original idea… into… wait for it… an unoriginal piece of crappola.
Well said.
Actually Flitty, that is often the case. Stop being a bitter writer. DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE was a retooled spec – very solid movie. Every movie PIXAR has ever done has nine hundred writers on it. BLACK SWAN had a laundry list. Same goes with THE FIGHTER. Those are just the good ones from this year. Very rarely is a great movie accomplished by someone’s singular vision. Hence the term, “collaborative medium.”
You’re an idiot.
No, you are! Nanner Nanner
@westla: Hence the term, “I’m a studio douche trying to justify my meager existence”.
Die Hard with a Vengeance is one of the worst films ever made.
Wow, you have no f**kin taste in action movies.
Yeah, Die Hard With a Vengeance and it’s cyber-criminals! Man, that was the most originalistic idea ever! Where the hell is Dr. No when you need him.
Seconded.
Thirded.
Oh please, WESTLA, there is a difference between being bitter and being realistic my fine-feathered friend. While defending myself on a message board clearly is beyond silly, I’d like to say that I am actually not a bitter writer but a successful one who is aware of what goes on in this business. However, I am disgusted by it. A piece of writing was created by a writer and if left alone (outside of revisions by said writer during production) it should and will hold it’s own, which is why it was purchased and/or developed in the first place. There are some, many, scripts that work out, sure, but that’s not to say they’d have been better in their original form. Die Hard With a Vengeance succeeded, yes, but what about the ill-conceived Die Hard 4, which ALSO was rewritten as a Die Hard flick when it was originally a spec that had nothing to do with the franchise or the John McClane character (which is clear with every frame of that absurd flick). Good luck out there, WESTLA… you’re gonna need it. Unless you’re a suit. Because then you’re gonna do just fine!
OMG, Flitty, you are beyond clueless about scripts. Have you ever read the original scripts of some of the best movies of all time? They vary a lot from the final product. Scripts don’t just “hold their own” – they need work, like a lot of pieces of art. And, sometimes, the original writer doesn’t have the solutions or the talent to complete the job. By your logic, Robert Towne should have never come in on The Godfather. And David Twohy should have stayed home for The Fugitive. And Nick Meyer on Fatal Attraction etc etc. Some great scripts have just one writer. So do some lousy ones. And many, many great scripts have multiple writers. Oh, and let’s not mention television which depends on multiple writers to keep show’s fresh. And, btw, the original Die Hard? Multiple writers. Steve DeSouza brought in right before production. And its based on a book that wasn’t set in LA and had to do with rescuing his daughter and grandchildren and isn’t even named John McClane. So, get off your pedestal.
Let’s not forget that DIE HARD 2 was based on a novel and had its lead character rewritten into Bruce Willis’s John McLain.
Okay, then I would love to see someone operate a studio by the FLITTY DOCTRINE of “thou shalt not touch an artist’s pure and original vision.” By that case, Marty McFly would still be going back to the future in a refrigerator. ET would still be a horror movie. Terry Southern never would have been brought on to move DOCTOR STRANGELOVE away from a conventional war thriller.
Sure, there are the brilliant singular voices out there, whose genius made it through untouched and unsullied to a brilliant final product – NETWORK, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, HAROLD AND MAUDE, FARGO, UNFORGIVEN, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, CHINATOWN, etc. But you know the unfortunate truth? Most writers aren’t Chayefsky, Peoples, Towne, or the Coens. They just aren’t. And therefore the unfortunate reality is that a functional movie has to be built by the collaborate efforts of a lot of talented people. That process can often produce crap, but it’s also most likely the only way to build a functional movie.
Oh, and that REASON the exec may have bought a script in the first place Flitty was not because he/she was so inspired by it’s brilliance. He/She probably dug the concept and thought the rest sucked. And he/she knew that he could find a better writer to actually make it readable.
I think the truth is that the real auteur of any film is G-d. (Or, if you’re an atheist, random chance.)
The Quad Cinema is booked full of doomed, four-walled indie films made by director-screenwriter-gaffer-caterers who maxed out their credit cards and had full creative control over every page of the script, every editing decision, and every cup of craft service table yogurt.
A lot of the people who helped make those films go home and Netflix up . . . Blazing Saddles, which has five credited writers.
The director and producers who try to stick with one good writer and one good script probably have a greater chance of succeeding, just because they’ll probably be more careful about every aspect of filmmaking, but, you never know. Life can be very unfair. Pirates of the Caribbean, for example, has a wretched concept, a wretched script and four writers, but it’s way, way more watchable, in its own appalling way, than many classy, auteur theory films, because the actors are all hot and Johnny Depp is brilliant. When film people are trying to one up one another by talking about what they saw at SXSW a couple of weeks ago, they’ll talk about auteur films, but, when they’re at home sick with a cold, they’ll watch Pirates of the Caribbean.
Exactly.
hate to burst your bubble/rant, Filthy, but some of the best movies of all time had multiple writers. Casablanca being the easiest example (8+ writers). And some of the worst movies of all time have just one writer. Bill Goldman was (and continues to be) right about this town: no one knows anything.
I think the reason for would-be screenwriters’ ignorance about film making is that a lot of us got interested in screenwriting because of Harlan Ellison’s rantings and essays, and he got into writing scripts through writing pulp fiction.
Ellison is great at understanding what makes a character or a plot tick, but, if you read about his complaints about what Roddenberry, Coon, etc. did to his City on the Edge of Forever script, you see that he was pretty clueless about how production works.
Yeah, thank god Casablanca or even Out of Africa only had one writer, otherwise the unique vision of that story would have been ruined by the studio.
(this is snark)
How about Francis Ford Crappola to direct?
There are few ways to more blatantly disrespect a franchise and a character by simply grafting a completely separate and unrelated script onto him. Characters and story are not mad libs.
Old screenwriting adages like “Story is character” become adages for a reason — oh well, the execs at Paramount obviously can’t be bothered.
With Ben Affleck’s recent resurgence, I wonder if Paramount wishes they had just stuck with him as Jack Ryan? THE SUM OF ALL FEARS seems to have been forgotten these days, but I remember it being a hit some nine years ago.
You are kidding, right? Sum of All Fears was a HORRIBLE adaptation of an otherwise strong story. It was easily the worst movie to come from the Clancy franchise.
That studio is a mess!
Actually stoked about this. Would rather see more Kirk than Ryan anyway.
I would love to see a Star Trek sequel.
I’m the Trekkiest of all Trekkies. I used to know the names of the lead screenwriter for every episode of the old show. I loved Shatner and Nimoy. I had the arguments for and against the use of the terms “Trekkie” and “Trekker” memorized. And I thought the script for the first reboot was pretty terrible. The bad guy was weak, and the plot made no sense.
But . . . the actors were perfect. The director/writers/editors/whoever got the relationships between the characters perfect. Up
till the plot fell apart, the dialogue was great.
If Paramount could just take the good stuff it had in the first reboot and come up with a decent bad guy, the sequel would be wonderful.
EXACTLY!
The script was a sloppy Khan rehash, but the casting of the characters was so incredible I didn’t care. There were actually moments I had to remind myself that wasn’t Leonard Nimoy in front of me. Somewhere De Kelly is smiling because Karl Urban embodied his McCoy to a perfect T!
As for the sequel, now that they’ve gotten the justification/rationalizations for canon changes out of the way, Kurtzman/Orzci are terrific, imaginative writers. They’ll come up w/ excellent, thought provoking material worthy of the franchise.
Yea, but big budget blockbusters like that aren’t really tailored towards the absolute die hard trekkie fans like yourself. I’d seen a few star trek episodes, knew a lot of the backstory, and thought it was one of the best reboots i’d seen in a long time. It was a star trek movie for the every-man, which is exactly what it needed to be. That’s why it grossed 400 million. Movies are supposed to be fun for everyone. I’m hopeful that with more wiggle room in this sequel they will take more chances, but for the opening reboot film, i thought it was great
Christopher Nolan and Brad Pitt as Jack Ryan. Salty sexy meets bending warp action on the scale of a Christopher Nolan visionary epic.
If the Execs want to re-write scripts so much, they should only get pitches, pay for the pitches, and THEN re-write their own unoriginal ideas into it. Buy the Writer the up-front and destroy later.
BTW the ‘collaborative’ thing comes when shooting, when professionals who know what they’re doing work on the project. If Execs want to write, than they should just write.
Why can’t they just make the DEBT OF HONOR? That was one of Clancy’s better novels in the Ryan Universe. From Debt of honor you transition to EXECUTIVE ORDERS. Why waste time trying to craft a whole new story.
More Star Trek instead of more CIA shenanigans? Sounds great to me.
Debt of Honor is unfilmable with it’s plot. Way to close to 9/11 and also Hollywood would not a make movie right now with Japan as the villain. On the other hand Bear and The Dragon would be interesting but after the sanitizing of Red Dawn could China be the bad guy in a Hollywood movie? This leaves us with Red Rabbit or Cardinal of The Kremlin both a little to steeped in the cold war but could be tweaked into an acceptable origin movie, or they Could remake Hunt For Red October about a North Korean nuclear sub commander defecting to west coast, probably knowing Hollywood that Is the direction they would take. Why even resurrect this character anyway these days the 18 – 30 crowd thinks Tom Clancy makes video games, Rainbow Six or Splinter Cell have more potential to make more money than any Jack Ryan movie.
What I find most interesting about this story is that they are planning to release Star Trek 2 next year! Isn’t that a very tight turn around?
I was assuming it would be out in 2013 seeing as Super 8 is out this year and thought that 4 years between instalments of a new franchise is a bit strange but this is verysurprising!
The new Jack Ryan movie was planned to be shot in Hungary, but that was cancelled about 2 months ago.. Anyone knows what’s the current plan for for shooting location..? …whenever the movie will resurrect:)
Let’s get moving on Star Trek please! The clock is ticking and they did too good a job on the first one to drop the ball now.
Just bring back Harrison Ford as an older Ryan. He aged in the book series, why can’t he on screen?
Why keep de-aging the character? What’s wrong with this studio?
This is why so many Hollywood movies suck. Find a script that works, buy it and shoot it. You don’t make scripts better by throwing writers at it. It’s obvious that Hollywood execs are so panicked and clueless that they don’t know what else to do.
Go work in a shoe store, guys. Hollywood is dead.
What’s all the fuss about? If they want to resuscitate one of the most boring action heroes of all time, let em have at it.