For a few months now Paramount has been looking for a director for its planned reboot of the Jack Ryan franchise, which will see Star Trek’s Chris Pine playing a rather younger version of the agent than Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford did (and we’ll just forget about Ben Affleck, okay?).
Names like Sam Raimi, Gore Verbinski, Timur Bekmambetov and Kevin MacDonald were all bandied about, but either none of them wanted the job or Paramount decided to go in a different direction, as Vulture reports Jack Bender is a cats breath away from landing the job. Primarily a TV director (although he did also helm Child’s Play 3), in recent years Bender has worked extensively with JJ Abrams, directing 11 episodes of Alias and 36 episodes of Lost. As pretty much everyone who’s ever had anything to do with Abrams is getting a major movie career at the moment, it seems like it’s Bender’s turn.
In the new Jack Ryan film, ‘a fresh-from-the-Marines Jack Ryan goes to work as an analyst for a Russian billionaire, but winds up on the run after being implicated in a terrorist plot’. For a long time it was going under the title Moscow, but that’s apparently been ditched, although no new name has been announced.