Chris Pine is now in that part of an up and comer#s career where they’ve scored their big break and now have to try and capitalise on it before the buzz quietens down. Following the release of Star Trek, he quickly signed up for Tony Scott’s Unstoppable, so he’d have a big movie in 2010 (he’s also got the indie comedy Small Town Saturday Night coming out, although he signed up for that before he broke big). He also agreed to be Paramount’s new Jack Ryan, becoming the fourth person to take on the role following Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck.
At the time Pine signed up it was said it would be a complete revamp of Tom Clancy’s character, not based on any of the book and would take Ryan back to his youth. However for the last few months we’ve heard very little more about the project. Now Pajiba has done some digging and discovered the new film is going by the working title Moscow, which unusprisingly means Jack will be heading to Russia.
Pajiba’s source says “The movie will pick up with Jack Ryan not long after his stint in the Marines, before hes joined the CIA, while hes a Wall Street stock broker, an occupation that will play heavily into the script. In the new movie, he will have transplanted to Moscow to continue his financial advising, not for Merill Lynch (where he worked in the book), but for a billionaire employer. 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. After that, Ryan must race against time to clear his name, reveal the terrorist plot, and save his wife, who has been taken hostage by the billionaire employer.” Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
It’s interesting that while Tom Clancy’s Ryan books started back during the Cold War, with the Ruskies as the default enemy, it seems that despite the passage of time and the fall of Communism, the Russians are still going to the problem. There’s no news yet on when they film might go into production, and whether Pine will be able to get it done before or after next year’s Star Trek 2 shoot.