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WME Signs Author Tom Clancy

By NELLIE ANDREEVA | Wednesday November 14, 2012 @ 12:16pm PSTTags: Tom Clancy, WME
Nellie Andreeva

Tom ClancyEXCLUSIVE: Tom Clancy has signed with WME. This is a rare representation change for the prolific spy novelist and a return to the traditional Hollywood agency world. Clancy started off with longtime agent Robert Gottlieb at WME predecessor WMA before leaving him in 2000 after 18 years to join Michael Ovitz at his Artist Management Group. After the company’s collapse, Clancy remained with Ovitz.

Clancy had several of his bestsellers featuring his hero CIA analyst Jack Ryan turned into Hollywood tentpoles: his first book The Hunt For Red October, Patriot Games, Clear And Present Danger and most recently 2002′s The Sum Of All Fears. He also has had works made into video game franchises like Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell. WME has signed Clancy as Paramount preps a reboot of the Ryan series that will be released in December 2013 with Chris Pine starring and Kenneth Branagh directing. Putnam publishes Clancy’s new novel, Threat Vector, next month.

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‘Jack Ryan’ Film Based on Tom Clancy Hero Scheduled For Release Dec. 25, 2013

By NIKKI FINKE, Editor in Chief | Monday August 27, 2012 @ 1:13pm PDTTags: Chris Pine, Jack Ryan, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Clancy

Related: ‘Jack Ryan’ Finally Set For 4th Quarter 2013; Keira Knightley Cast As Chris Pine’s Love Interest; Prequel Story Starts Trilogy

Paramount and … Read More »

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Paramount’s ‘Jack Ryan’ Resurrecting Tom Clancy’s Hero Finally Set For 4th Quarter 2013; Keira Knightley Cast As Chris Pine’s Love Interest; Prequel Story Starts Trilogy

By NIKKI FINKE AND MIKE FLEMING JR | Wednesday August 22, 2012 @ 7:07pm PDTTags: Big Deals Film, Chris Pine, David Koepp, Jack Ryan, Keira Knightley, Kenneth Branagh, Kevin Costner, Tom Clancy

EXCLUSIVE: Deadline can now confirm the cast for this long gestating, highly anticipated action thriller that will be the first of an anticipated franchise trilogy. It resurrects the popular Tom Clancy character of CIA analyst Jack Ryan last seen on film in 2002 and now played by Chris Pine in the role already made famous by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck. After various starts and stops, bad luck and good fortune, Deadline also has learned that Jack Ryan finally has come together for a release in the 4th quarter of 2013.

Paramount chose to wait for Pine to complete the second installment of Star Trek in this contemporized original prequel story that picks up Ryan before he joined the CIA. (Paramount long ago locked in Pine after he played Captain Kirk.) His love interest and the female lead is Keira Knightley. Paramount was intensely searching because it’s a high profile role — an older version of the character was played by Anne Archer in the Harrison Ford films — and involves options that would potentially put the actress in three pictures.

As Deadline previously reported, Kevin Costner has an invented but key role as does the film’s director Kenneth Branagh who will play the Russian villain plotting to wreck the U.S. economy. Paramount began talks with the Thor helmer to replace the once-attached Jack Bender. Paramount courted Costner to become a linchpin in not only Jack Ryan but also the spinoff franchise Without Remorse based on Clancy’s 1993 novel. (The studio is now courting The Dark Knight Rises villain Tom Hardy to star, with Christopher McQuarrie rewriting to direct.) The deal that came together envisions Costner potentially headlining his own film as William Harper, a true blue American idealist who recruits and mentors both Ryan and John Kelly from Without Remorse. Kelly later becomes CIA operative Clark.

Paramount like every studio is looking to build tentpoles and has a good opportunity for more than one here by cross-pollinating characters Ryan and Clark like The Avengers successfully keeps doing.

Branagh recently described the movie as “an original story that allows us to understand how Jack Ryan develops into a CIA analyst, before joining, and perhaps even joining, the CIA. It’s a very contemporary action thriller set in the here and now.” its launching point is mentioned in Clancy’s The Hunt For Red October book and film: a terrifying helicopter crash that nearly killed Ryan when he was a 23-year-old Marines platoon leader and the only member to survive.

Paramount Pictures and co-financier Skydance Productions went top shelf to get the franchise relaunch to the starting line and hired David Koepp for 7-figures to redraft the script by Adam Cozad known as Moscow. Cozad was a screenwriter without a screen credit and yet now is in the middle of some of the bigger projects in town. Read More »

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Paramount Confirms Christopher McQuarrie Taking On Tom Clancy’s ‘Without Remorse’

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Tuesday August 7, 2012 @ 8:40am PDTTags: Big Deals Film, Christopher McQuarrie, Jack Ryan, Paramount, Tom Clancy, Without Remorse
Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Pictures has confirmed to me that it is near a deal with Christopher McQuarrie to adapt Tom Clancy’s 1993 novel Without Remorse, with an eye toward directing the film. I’d revealed last week that this was looking … Read More »

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David Koepp Takes On ‘The Thin Man’ For Johnny Depp And Rob Marshall

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Tuesday August 30, 2011 @ 11:58am PDTTags: Adam Cozad, Chris Pine, Christi Dembrowski, David Koepp, Gore Verbinski, Jack Bender, Jerry Bruckheimer, Johnny Depp, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kevin McCormick, Michael Shannon, Rob Marshall, Tom Clancy
Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: While Johnny Depp waits to see if director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer can figure out a way to salvage The Lone Ranger after Disney halted the film because of a huge budget, Depp is making forward progress on dusting off another period property. David Koepp has been set to write the script for the remake of the 76-year-old film The Thin Man, the remake that Depp set up last year at Warner Bros as a vehicle to re-team with his Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides director Rob Marshall. Depp will produce with his Infinitum Nihil partner Christi Dembrowski, Langley Park’s Kevin McCormick, Marshall and John DeLuca. There was talk that Jerry Stahl was going to write, but apparently nothing was written and Koepp is going to start from scratch. Which means he’ll go back to the Dashiell Hammett novel that spawned the series of six MGM films that starred William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Depp will play Nick, the former detective who marries an adorable young socialite, drinks a lot and occasionally solves a case. There is no word yet on who’ll join Depp and play Nora. The original intention is to take elements of the first two films and work them into one film, putting it into a period setting and giving it a Sherlock Holmes-like stylized treatment. Marshall also intends to use his talent as a choreographer (remember he did Chicago) and work in a musical number or two. Read More »

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Can ‘Star Trek 2′ Morph From 70-Page Outline To Summer Tent Pole In 13 Months?

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Tuesday May 24, 2011 @ 4:03pm PDTTags: Adam Cozad, Alex Kurtzman, Chris Pine, Damon Lindelof, David Koepp, Gavin Hood, Jack Ryan, JJ Abrams, Michael Bay, Ridley Scott, Roberto Orci, Tom Clancy
Mike Fleming

Paramount isn’t confirming any of this, but I’m told that there soon should be good news and bad news on the Star Trek sequel front. The good news: With his film Super 8 set for release June 10, JJ Abrams is expected to announce shortly his return as director of Star Trek 2. The bad news: Even moving at warp speed, Abrams will be hard pressed to make the June 29, 2012 release date that the studio set for the film. I’m told that the move being considered right now is to push Trek back for a Holiday 2012 release. This comes after Paramount pushed back the other franchise film in its arsenal that has Chris Pine as its star. Pine’s also playing Jack Ryan in the reboot of the Tom Clancy-created series. Pine was expected to shoot that film first, but the script wasn’t ready. Paramount hired David Koepp to rewrite Adam Cozad’s script. Koepp just began writing this week after completing his film Premium Rush.

Why is Star Trek in such precarious shape, just 13 months before its release date? The film has three top-flight writers in Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof. Like Abrams, all of them have been busy on other films. Kurtzman directed Welcome to People. Orci has been busy on Cowboys & Aliens and in prepping the Gavin Hood-directed sci-fi epic Ender’s Game. Lindelof has been busy working on Prometheus, the Ridley Scott film for Fox that was conceived as a 3D prequel until Lindelof came on to do a rewrite and changed the concept so much that they consider it an original. The result? It doesn’t sound like they are close to having a script that will live up to the high quality of the first film that revived a dead franchise. Read More »

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Pair Of Hunt For Bin Laden Projects Could Be Timeliest Movies In Hollywood Now

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Sunday May 1, 2011 @ 9:37pm PDTTags: Joel Edgerton, Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Oliver Stone, Osama Bin Laden, Tom Clancy
Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: I’ve learned that Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow in recent weeks has been preparing and starting to cast an indie movie with the working title Kill Bin Laden, while another movie project about the hunt for the Al Queda terrorist leader at a major Hollywood studio stalled back in 2006. Given tonight’s startling news, it’s clear that these  may be the timeliest film projects in recent Hollywood history. And judging from tonight’s showbiz phone calls coming into Deadline about Osama bin Laden’s death, I wouldn’t be surprised if the movie studios are anxious to bring these projects to the big screen as soon as possible, updated with the details behind tonight’s successful military mission. Have you seen those spontaneous cheering crowds that formed tonight outside Washington DC’s White House and in NYC’s Times Square as well as around major American cities and small towns? If a patriotic film about this story can tap into these feelings of first helpless horror and then widespread frustration and then successful closure, it could be a real winner at the box office.

Bigelow and Mark Boal, her collaborator on The Hurt Locker, have been mobilizing their film to go into production as their follow-up to that Best Picture Academy Award winner. Their movie as planned was based on an earlier unsuccessful mission to try to kill the Al Qaeda leader responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack on America as he hid in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But now they’ve certainly got a celebratory ending to that dramatic story with tonight’s announcement that the U.S. conducted a military operation that killed Bin Laden. Mind you, reps for Bigelow have told me previously that this movie isn’t specifically about the Al Qaeda leader. A lot of details about this film are stilll sketchy and secret, but I’ve heard that Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle chief Larry Ellison, is ready to fund it. I heard as recently as Friday that Bigelow and Boal were courting Joel Edgerton for the lead actor. Edgerton had been on the short list for two Universal Pictures movie projects in the works, The Bourne Legacy and Snow White And The Huntsman.

Meanwhile, back in 2006, Paramount Pictures optioned Jawbreaker, a book by U.S. intelligence operative Gary Berntsen about the December 2001 American-led military mission to hunt and kill Bin Laden right during the opening stages of the 9/11-prompted invasion of Afghanistan that the author as the CIA pointman had helped coordinate with Special Operations Forces. The heavily vetted book detailed how close those forces came to finding and executing Bin Laden in the rugged mountains of Tora Bora until they were pulled back after a decision was made to let Pakistan tribal leaders lead the search — a decision experts felt helped Bin Laden get away. The studio hired The Path To 9/11 scribe Cyrus Nowrasteh Read More »

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Script Delays Puts ‘Star Trek’ Sequel Before Jack Ryan For Chris Pine And Paramount

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Monday March 28, 2011 @ 5:29pm PDTTags: Adam Cozad, Alex Kurtzman, Anthony Peckham, Chris Pine, Damon Lindelof, Hossein Amini, Jack Bender, Jack Ryan, JJ Abrams, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Roberto Orci, Steve Zaillian, Tom Clancy
Mike Fleming

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 … Read More »

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‘Lost’s Jack Bender Is Jack Ryan Frontrunner

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Monday August 2, 2010 @ 3:17pm PDTTags: Adam Cozad, Chris Pine, Jack Bender, Moscow, Paramount Pictures, Skydance Productions, Tom Clancy
Mike Fleming

Jack Bender is atop the short list of directors to resuscitate the Tom Clancy-created Jack Ryan franchise, with Chris Pine playing the character in a contemporized original story that picks up Ryan before he joined the CIA. Paramount Pictures and co-financier Skydance Productions are readying for a February production start and I’ve heard Bender is the fave among a group of directors who’ve met on the coveted gig. He’s meeting today with Pine at the studio. The pic’s tentatively titled Moscow, and has a script by Adam Cozad. Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Mace Neufeld are producing.

While Bender has features on his resume, his momentum comes from his work as director and exec producer on Lost, where he helmed the finale. He has also directed episodes of Alias, The Sopranos, and many other series. Paramount long ago locked in Pine to play Ryan, after the studio saw what they had when he played Captain Kirk in Paramount’s relaunch of Star Trek. Pine next stars with Reese Witherspoon and Tom Hardy in the Fox comedy This Means War, and the plan is to put the Jack Ryan film into production by February so Pine can play Ryan and then reprise as Kirk in the Star Trek sequel. Read More »

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Is E-Book Sales Milestone Worth Cheering?

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Tuesday July 20, 2010 @ 6:21am PDTTags: Amazon E-Books, Book Publishing, Book Sales, E-Books, Elmore Leonard, James Patterson, Kindle, Tom Clancy
Mike Fleming

318208709_e9bcd442a6Amazon.com is crowing that for the first time, its e-book sales volume has surpassed hardcovers. Am I the only one who sees this as an apocalyptic sign for the great pleasure of book reading? Amazon’s basing  its assertion on sales figures … Read More »

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Thriller Books-To-Films: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Sunday July 11, 2010 @ 6:22am PDTTags: Barry Levinson, Books, Robert Ludlum, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Tom Clancy
Mike Fleming

the-bourne-identity-by-robert-ludlumThe just completed Thrillerfest — think  Comic-Con for thriller authors and their fans —   featured a lecture that caught my eye. Sleepers author Lorenzo Carcaterra chose the 10 best thriller films made from books, the 10 worst, and the 10 he … Read More »

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