While the original Jack Reacher film pulled lukewarm reviews and box office receipts for a Tom Cruise thriller, Paramount Studios has decided to take a second crack at turning the popular Lee Child character into someone worthy of their own movie franchise.
Cruise is set to return as military investigator turned travelling do-gooder Jack Reacher, while Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz are set to write the sequel. Zwick, best known for his work on The Last Samurai, will also take over directing duties from Christopher McQuarrie. As for the plot of the movie, Cinema Blend has the details:
The duo will be working off of the Lee Child novel Never Go Back, in which Tom Cruise’s character, Jack Reacher, travels to Virginia to finally meet Susan, a female military officer who has been helping him, via telephone, on previous engagements. Only, when he arrives, he walks into a mess of trouble – both personal and professional – as only Reacher can.
This continues Paramount’s trend of completely ignoring the chronology of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books. All in all there are 20 novels, with the plot of the original Jack Reacher film being taken from 2005’s One Shot, the 9th book in the series. The sequel is based on 2013’s Never Go Back, the 18th Jack Reacher book. It also ties up several storylines that are built up in the preceding three Jack Reacher novels.
Whether Zwick and Herskovitz plan to stick specifically to Never Go Back content or pull from all four books isn’t clear at the moment. But considering Tom Cruise’s busy schedule, you’d imagine they feel they have a tale worth telling that will resonate with theater goers and fans of the books alike.
