Paramount’s still trying to crack the script on the studio’s planned reboot of the Jack Ryan series. Screenwriters have come and gone, but now the call is out to Schindler’s List/American Gangster writer Steven Zaillian to take a pass on it.
While the slowly developing film has a star (Star Trek’s Chris Pine) attached to play Ryan and a director in place (Lost veteran Jack Bender), the story has been eluding everyone brought aboard to write it.
Hossein Amini wrote the first draft a couple of years ago, then the studio nabbed Adam Cozad’s original spec Dubai to refashion as a likely plot for the new adventure. Since then, Anthony Peckham has given it a polish and Cozad was brought back on shortly after to do some more tweaking.
Now the executives are hoping that Zaillian, who has just been hired by DreamWorks to script a remake of Spanish thriller **Timecrimes and most recently wrote the US version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (while also getting set to adapt The Girl Who Played with Fire) for David Fincher is the man to make it work.
It wouldn’t be his first time working on a Ryan story – Zaillian wrote 1994’s **Clear and Present **Danger and Deadline’s report mentions that he did some uncredited script doctoring on Patriot Games. There are no real solid details on what the as-yet-untitled new film will be about beyond the fact that it’ll follow a younger Ryan on an early assignment and might just be linked to a nasty helicopter crash talked about in The Hunt for Red October…