Paramount's Jack Ryan Reboot Loses Director Jack Bender

After long-gestating delays on Paramount Pictures' attempts to bring a new Jack Ryan thriller to the screen with the formerly titled 'Moscow', Variety reports that pre-production has hit another snag as the film has just lost its director. Former Lost chief director Jack Bender has exited the film that would have marked his feature directorial debut when it goes in front of cameras this summer. Chris Pine is still attached to play the Tom Clancy created Jack Ryan, the cerebral C.I.A. agent in a new origin story/reboot. Ryan has previously been portrayed by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck in four previous high-profile movies. The plan is still to shoot this summer when Pine has finished playing Captain Kirk for the second time in the currently filming Star Trek sequel. But the hunt is now on to find a new filmmaker who will be available to bring fresh life to the decade dormant franchise that in the 90s was a successful money maker for Paramount. The now untitled fifth Jack Ryan film looked all set to shoot last summer but Paramount stalled the film just weeks before filming, hiring accomplished screenwriter David Koepp to re-write the script that four others had worked on (Adam Cozad, American Gangster€™s Steve Zaillian, Sherlock Holmes€™ Anthony Peckham and The Four Feathers€™ Hossein Aimini) and the producers signalling their desire to wait for Pine to shoot his other big Paramount blockbuster the now shooting Star Trek 2. But when Star Trek 2 was delayed from its late 2011 shoot to early 2012, Bender's attachment to the project looked in doubt over his busy schedule. Bender is currently working as exec producer on JJ Abrams' struggling show Alcatraz at Fox before he gets to work on the Syfy pilot "Rewind" and has now bowed out. Tentatively titled Moscow (or Dubai as it was originally pitched), the idea for the Jack Ryan reboot which has now been €˜re-purposed€™ by Koepp, supposedly harkens back to a brief mention in Alec Baldwin€™s Hunt For Red October;

It has to do with a terrifying helicopter crash that nearly killed Ryan when he was a 23-year old platoon leader in the US Marines. He was the only member of the platoon to survive.

Producer Marc Neufeld previously told Coming Soon of the project;

"We pick him up when he's on Wall Street," he said. "... 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."