Final assignment: ‘Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan’ starts his last Prime Video mission
Jack Ryan has had several screen lives, via a variety of actors, and his latest one is about to begin its final round.
John Krasinski returns as the CIA analyst who typically finds himself in the thick of action as the fourth and final season of the Prime Video adventure-drama “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” premieres Friday, June 30. Arriving six months after Season 3 began – an unusually short span between seasons for a streaming series – the program will debut two of its six new episodes each Friday, and the concluding story tests Ryan in terms of enemies both foreign and domestic.
Now the acting deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Ryan is concerned with the behavior of his own operatives as he starts a probe of possible corruption. Before long, though, he discovers several black ops situations that might make America vulnerable to plots from overseas … with the union of a drug cartel and a terrorist group potentially spelling very bad things for the United States, and challenging Ryan’s strongly held beliefs in right, wrong and justice.
Krasinski also is among the executive producers of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” on which novelist Clancy is given the same credit posthumously. Other returning cast members include Wendell Pierce – a Tony Award nominee this year for “Death of a Salesman” – as Ryan’s former supervisor James Greer, and Abbie Cornish in a reprise of her Season 1 role as Ryan’s girlfriend (and, per the Clancy books, eventual wife) Dr. Cathy Mueller. The new season also features Michael Pena as Domingo Chavez, the protagonist of an intended spinoff series.
As mentioned, “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” is the latest iteration of a franchise that dates back to 1987 in print (“Patriot Games” was the first novel) and to 1990 on film. “The Hunt for Red October” was the initial Ryan movie, and though he certainly was a major character as played by Alec Baldwin, top billing went to the star who played the character Ryan was investigating: Sean Connery as Soviet submarine commander Marko Ramius.
The film was an enormous hit for its time, making more than $200 million worldwide, and one only can speculate whether the result would have been the same if the originally intended casting (Kevin Costner as Ryan, Klaus Maria Brandauer as Ramius) had stuck. The outcome virtually demanded a follow-up, and that arrived in 1992 with the screen version of “Patriot Games,” but with a significant change in the actor playing Ryan.
Stories differ as to why Baldwin didn’t return, mostly related to the timing of his commitment to a Broadway revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” but Harrison Ford got the part next … and not just for one film, but for two. Harrison Ford, who had built a reputation for brainy action tales, was enlisted to assume the part; that turned out to be a good move, since the picture grossed slightly under $180 million internationally in its original theatrical run.
That made Paramount Pictures feel good about retaining Ford for 1994’s “Clear and Present Danger,” though Clancy hadn’t been happy with the “Patriot Games” movie and had considered withholding the screen rights to other Ryan stories. (A considerable financial incentive for the author reportedly resolved that hurdle.) Despite problems caused by Mexican-location unrest and earthquake-damaged footage, all turned out well, with “Clear and Present Danger” becoming the franchise’s top-grossing entry with $216 million worldwide.
By the time the movies were ready to revisit Ryan, Ford had dropped out over script disagreements, and 2002’s “The Sum of All Fears” was revised to be an origin story – along the lines of Daniel Craig’s James Bond debut in “Casino Royale” – with the younger Ben Affleck playing Ryan. Interestingly, Affleck has said he was working with initial “Ryan” actor Baldwin on “Pearl Harbor” on the day he got the offer, and both Baldwin and Ford gave him their blessing on succeeding them.
The outcome was quite satisfactory, with “The Sum of All Fears” (which is now something of a staple on cable networks) topping $190 million in international profits. Though that would be Affleck’s one turn as Ryan, at least up to now, that casting can be seen as helping to make it plausible for Chris Pine to take up the part in 2014’s “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” (which finally brought Costner into the franchise as a co-star) … and then for Krasinski to inherit the role in the Prime Video series when it began in 2018.