Caffeinated Clint
About a week ago I’d heard there was some trouble on the Jack Ryan reboot, which Chris Pine is attached to star in and “Lost” alum Jack Bender was set to direct.
Variety reports that Bender has “fallen out” of the project.
Says the trade :
Bender is currently the exec producer on Fox’s “Alcatraz” and is set to helm the Syfy pilot “Rewind.” Par was hoping to get this project into production sometime later this summer, and Bender’s TV workload was making it difficult for him to find the time.
Now here’s my report from a week ago; tell me you believe this ‘scheduling difficulties’ nonsense!?
Wondering why we haven’t yet seen Chris Pine’s incarnation of Jack Ryan? It has, after all, been a couple of years since the reboot of Paramount’s hotshot C.I.A. hero franchise was announced. “Moscow”, as it was initially called, has Chris Pine (“Star Trek”) set as the young Ryan ( the character Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck, respectively, played before him) and “Lost” alum Jack Bender onboard to direct.
The film went through many, many different drafts, let alone writers- and the story changed in a few instances too – but it isn’t script issues that have delayed the picture. Nope, in fact the studio, and the main parties involved, love scribe Tony Peckham’s newest draft.
The problem? Purely financial. Paramount doesn’t want to make that script – not with the high-dollar value attached to it. With all of the studios tightening their wallets these days (as we’ve seen with Universal, who canned high-profile projects from Tom Cruise and Ron Howard because of coin; and of course, Disney’s The Lone Ranger, which was forced to make drastic cuts to its budget – and it’s actors, including Johnny Depp, also had to take pay cuts – and trim some big, expensive action sequences out of the script if it didn’t want to be derailed), no surprise to hear that Paramount want to make the new Jack Ryan movie for as less as possible.
The film is on track to shoot when Pine wraps “Star Trek 2” but a source tells us, despite how happy everyone is with the current draft, Paramount still wants some edits to reflect a reduced budget. It’s very much “The Lone Ranger” situation all over again- in that, with a few trimmings, it’ll be before the cameras this year.
Hmmm….
