LONDON - If franchise rebooting were hip-hop, Jack Ryan would be the Sugar Hill Gang -- maybe not the first on the block, but certainly far enough ahead of the curve to look cool.
Tom Clancy's dogged CIA analyst, whose rise in the literary series would take him all the way to the White House, was played by a svelte Alec Baldwin in "Hunt For Red October," became Harrison Ford for a couple '90s hits and then was embodied by Ben Affleck in "Sum of All Fears."
It's early October in London and Jack Ryan is being rebirthed for a new generation under the careful watch of director Kenneth Branagh and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, as well as producer Mace Neufeld, who has had a hand in each of the franchise's previous incarnations.
The first of his adventures not to be based on a Clancy novel, this origin story is simply titled "Jack Ryan" and, on the film's set, those the producers tease a plot that they mostly promise will be contemporary.
"Our world right now faces incredible economic uncertainty," hints di Bonaventura. "The notion of what is a superpower has evolved and who actually can carry what muscle and what is America's role in the world and a terrorism and all those things exist in this movie. It feels incredibly contemporary, particularly the economic aspect of it and the sense that a lot of the larger kinda 'earthquake' moves that precipitate this movie have to do with the fact of what is the economic order and who's trying to take control over it. So it's not a movie about economics, but the effect of what is going on in the world is very, very driven and very, very clear in this movie, the relationship with that."
Adds David Barron, "It's a very real central premise to the story and it's something that, when you do get to know what that central premise is, if you think back there was something in the news quite recently where two international superpowers were... somebody contemplated the very thing that's happening in our story... It's very real, very contemporary and a lot of fun."
All of the producers credit Branagh's involvement, hot off of "Thor," with kick-starting the long-gestating project, while he, in turn, tips his hat to a script so juicy it even made him want to take a key supporting role.
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