The Jack Ryan reboot that's percolating at Paramount has just secured yet another screenwriter: the latest to spin through that revolving door is David Koepp. The franchise guru has reportedly just accepted a seven-figure sum to take a crack at Tom Clancy's super-spy. Paramount must be hoping that his draft will be the last.
The initial plans to have Chris Pine in front of Jack Bender's cameras a couple of months ago obviously came to nothing, with the studio opting to back-burner the project pending a workable script. It's been a particularly tough nut to crack. Hossein Amini (The Four Feathers) started the ball rolling back in 2008, before newcomer Adam Cozad came aboard charged with retooling his non-Ryan original script, at that time titled Dubai. Then Anthony Peckham (Invictus, Sherlock Holmes) was hired to give it a polish, then Cozad came back, and then Steve Zaillian (Clear and Present Danger) was tasked with a draft, only to get cold feet and pull out again.
Koepp will be providing his million penn'orth while Pine is off aboard the Enterprise again. He's previously been involved with the Spider-Man, Mission: Impossible and Jurassic Park series, but is currently finishing up the stand-alone Premium Rush, which he's also directing.
The basis for the still-untitled Ryan Begins (the mooted Moscow moniker seems to have been abandoned) apparently remains Cozad's story, with Ryan just out of the Marines, before he joins the CIA, working as a financial consultant for a Russian billionaire, and getting framed in a terrorist plot. Despite being based on none of Tom Clancy's novels, it apparently does feature the NATO-exercise helicopter crash mentioned in The Hunt For Red October, which saw Ryan invalided out of the Marine Corps.
Pine will be filming Star Trek 2 in the autumn, with the Jack Ryan shoot now pencilled in for January 2012.