Producer Mace Neufeld has worked on all four Jack Ryan movies — The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, A Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears — and will also be working on the fifth, currently untitled installment.
With Houssein Amani finished with a draft of the screenplay, and Adam Koxac working on another, Neufeld told Collider why the fifth movie had to be based on an original concept and not a Tom Clancy novel.
We ran out of books ... Red Rabbit was the last one and we just couldn't seem to get a script out of that one. Paramount wanted to restart the franchise. We had done that once before with Ben Affleck but they didn't make a film right after that because Ben got involved with some other film that didn't do well. Things quieted down. The new management came into Paramount and they said, "This is a really valuable franchise. Let's try to restart it with a younger actor." The Chris Pine idea came up and hopefully that’s what we'll be doing.
Neufeld stayed quiet on the plot of the fifth movie, though he did reveal that the story will start "when [Ryan]'s on Wall Street." Neufeld is currently waiting for Koxac's screenplay, which will arrive on January 3, 2010, and Neufeld says the rest of the story will be up to the writer.
Write what you want and then we'll fight with the studio.... It all starts with the writer. It really does. The Jack Ryan movies have never been action films. They're kind of "thinking man's thrillers".
Posted 12.07.09 by Ryan