New Details On The Chris Pine Reboot Of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Series

There's been no small amount of speculation about what the previously untitled Jack Ryan film starring Chris Pine will feature in terms of plot, where it might fit amongst the existing films starring Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck, and what it will mean for the character.

Now we've got a working title — Moscow — and some details about what we might expect from the script.

Pajiba reports that the film will find Ryan after his tour of duty as a Marine, before he joins the CIA. At that point the character is a stock broker, which will be a big part of the lead-in to the story. The title refers to the fact that, rather than working in Baltimore as the character did in the novels, he'll be working as an advisor in Moscow for a private employer. As Pajiba's report says, "It is that billionaire employer who eventually sets Jack Ryan up to take the fall for terrorist plot designed to collapse the U.S. economy."

That's more or less in keeping with producer Mace Neufeld's previous statement about the film:

We pick him up when he's on Wall Street...[but] the Jack Ryan movies have never been action films. They're kind of 'thinking man's thrillers.' Jack is referred to as a 'water-walker' because of his ability to jump ahead to conclusions. That's very big in all the Jack Ryan films and that's how we want to portray him. He's a teacher. He's a historian. He's a linguist. And he's really smart.

From there the film gets into territory that is somewhat familiar for the series: there's danger to his family and his own good name, and an enemy plot to uncover and thwart.

So the interesting detail is that Pajiba notes the script sounds a lot like Dubai, written by Adam Cozen and sold in 2007 to Jack Ryan / Moscow producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura. I won't give up too many details about the similarities here, because I suppose they could be considered spoilerish, but you can check the original article if you're really curious about points of comparison that may or may not hold true in the final tally. Last we heard, Cozen was tapped to rewrite Hossein Amini's script for this new version of the character, so the idea of incorporating elements of Dubai doesn't come out of left field.