Lee Child Vetoed Third Tom Cruise "Jack Reacher" Film For The TV Series
Who is your favorite Jack Reacher? Tom Cruise or Alan Ritchson?
'Jack Reacher' author Lee Child is talking with Collider about why he turned down a third film starring Tom Cruise to instead develop a TV series that would later premiere in 2022 with Alan Ritchson in the lead. And it had nothing to do with actors' heights or Xenu not helping Tom Cruise grow a foot.
"I had a clause in that movie contract that after two movies I had a veto whether we would do any more. I exercised that veto. The deal was done in 2005, and it finished in a long, long time of development. Then the two movies finished in 2017. That first movie in particular was huge. It came out in December 2012. By January 2013, like one reporting cycle later, I had eight old paperbacks in the Top 10. You cannot buy that, and you cannot turn it down."
Child was intrigued by the longer storytelling TV offered, "By 2017, of course, there was a whole new landscape. Binging television had been invented. Broadband was much more widespread. It was a thing now. It was not a thing in 2005. It hadn’t been invented, and nobody, I think, now would ever go for a feature film over streaming television for two reasons. First of all, the running time — it’s fabulous luxury. It really is. Eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, whatever you want. You can tell the whole story, all the light and shade, all the quiet parts, all the fun parts. It doesn’t have to be rammed together for 90 minutes of content."
"The finances are totally different. With a feature film, the actor attracts the money. What actor is worth a $200 million investment? Whereas with television, the platform pays it, and you can have anybody. You can have total unknowns,” he added. “The star on television doesn’t really attract either the audience or the money, and so we had a completely free hand for casting."
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Written By: Dan Lalonde
Photo Credit: Amazon/Paramount
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