Paramount's Jack Ryan Reboot Loses Director Jack Bender

For the past couple years and change, Paramount has been developing a revival of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan character, originally played by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt For Red October, and last seen in The Sum of All Fears, played by Ben Affleck.

The relative indifference that met Fears upon release put the character on ice for ten years, but at some point it is very likely that Jack Ryan will return. Chris Pine (Star Trek, This Means War) is set to play the analyst turned spy, and Lost director Jack Bender has been attached to direct since late summer in of 2010.

But now the longer-than-expected development period for the Jack Ryan movie has started to interfere with Bender's other commitments, and so the director has moved on.

Variety says that other TV commitments forced Bender to walk away from the still untitled Jack Ryan film.

As far as we know, Paramount plans to shoot the film later this year after Chris Pine finishes his work on the Star Trek sequel. David Koepp recently did the latest polish on the script, which has gone through quite a few writers.

Hossein Amini essentially originated this version of the project. Then a spec script called Dubai, by Adam Cozad, was picked up and Cozad ended up reworking it as a Jack Ryan vehicle called as Moscow. But Anthony Peckham, one of the Sherlock Holmes writers, came on. He was succeeded — briefly — by Adam Cozad once more, and then Steven Zaillian was brought on to do further work. But he left the project soon after, and the film was nearly stalled out.

All of which suggests at least one of a couple problems. There could be are conflicts on the producer level, or someone can't figure out what they really want. We know that Koepp was being paid big bucks to work on one of the Cozad drafts, but we don't know which one. Or it could be just a money thing, as has been suggested, in that one of the drafts came in and made people happy, but was too expensive and had to be scaled back.

At this point even recapping a plot seems pointless, as we don't have any idea what shape the script is in, but we can expect it, in a general sense, to pick up from the early days of Ryan's career.