Tom Clancy Wanted To Team Up With Tom Selleck For A Game-Changing Project

Espionage thriller author Tom Clancy, who died in 2013, had a significant presence in the world of pop culture. Apart from his numerous bestselling books, he had a hand in a great many TV, movie, and video game adaptations of his work ... but he wasn't a stickler on working exclusively with his own stories. 

One example of Clancy's willingness to venture into relatively un-Clancy-like territory took the form of Donald P. Bellisario and Glen A. Larson's seminal 1980s private investigator drama "Magnum P.I." Thomas Magnum's (Tom Selleck) mustache-laden adventures in Hawaii don't necessarily scream "gritty international spycraft," but Clancy happened to like the show quite a bit — so much, in fact, that he offered to tag team with "Magnum P.I." main actor Selleck on a mission to convert the show into a big-screen phenomenon.

In an interview with Yahoo! TV (via The Los Angeles Times), Selleck revealed that Clancy was looking to follow a string of hit movie adaptations with a "Magnum P.I." film, and even offered his writing talents for the project. Unfortunately, the star went on to describe how behind-the-scenes studio issues ended up permanently sidelining the two Toms' ambitious project:

"In the early '90s, [Clancy had] done a couple of wildly successful movie adaptations of his books. We got together, and I went to Universal, and I said, 'It's time we could do a series of feature films.' They were very interested, and I had Tom, who wanted to do the story, and I had this package put together, but Universal's the only studio that could make it, and they went through three ownership changes in the '90s, and I think that was the real window for 'Magnum.'"

Selleck, of course, wasn't quite correct in his assessment that time had driven its Ferrari 308 GTS past Thomas Magnum's cozy hidey-hole at Robin's Nest by the time the 1990s ended. In 2018, Magnum made his way back to CBS (and later NBC), now played by a charming (but mustache-free) Jay Hernandez ("Suicide Squad"). This remake of "Magnum P.I" made it to five seasons before its cancellation, keeping the good name of the show going ... and even adding to the original show's penchant for crossover episodes. While Selleck's Magnum cruised around the same narrative universe as detective show "Simon & Simon" and the legendary Angela Lansbury series "Murder, She Wrote," the reboot crossed paths with the modern version of "Hawaii Five-0."

All in all, it's far from a bad legacy. Still, who knows? Had things played out slightly otherwise when Clancy and Selleck were shopping out their vision, "Magnum, P.I." might have gone on to dominate screens both big and small for years, not unlike Clancy's perennially-rebooted CIA analyst hero, Jack Ryan.