Somehow rising above (pun unintended) the physical stature of the leading man, Tom Cruise, being somewhat off the book description of Jack Reacher, the two movies featuring the character were pretty good. The first was more successful with critics and at the box office than the second, but neither was terrible.
There were plans for a third movie, but it was abruptly shelved, and the franchise was killed off as a movie series. Reacher was resurrected as a streaming show for Amazon Prime and is an absolute smash hit. Four seasons down, two more greenlit, a spin-off, also with a second season greenlit. The ratings for the whole thing are famously through the roof.
But what forced the switch?
According to an interview with Collider recently, the author Lee Child confirmed that he pulled the plug on another movie. As he tells it:
“I had a clause in that movie contract that after two movies I had a veto whether we would do any more. I exercised that veto. The deal was done in 2005, and it finished in a long, long time of development. Then the two movies finished in 2017.
That first movie in particular was huge. It came out in December 2012. By January 2013, like one reporting cycle later, I had eight old paperbacks in the Top 10. You cannot buy that, and you cannot turn it down.
By 2017, of course, there was a whole new landscape. Binging television had been invented. Broadband was much more widespread. It was a thing now. It was not a thing in 2005. It hadn’t been invented, and nobody, I think, now would ever go for a feature film over streaming television for two reasons.
First of all, the running time – it’s a fabulous luxury. It really is. 8 hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, whatever you want. You can tell the whole story, all the light and shade, all the quiet parts, all the fun parts. It doesn’t have to be rammed together for 90 minutes of content.
The finances are totally different. With a feature film, the actor attracts the money. What actor is worth a $200 million investment? Whereas with television, the platform pays it, and you can have anybody. You can have total unknowns. The star on television doesn’t really attract either the audience or the money, and so we had a completely free hand for casting.”
This all seems sensible. It is also quite jarring to think for a moment about just how the landscape really has changed around entertainment, exactly as Child says.
