Author Lee Child has revealed he deliberately blocked a third Tom Cruise "Jack Reacher" film, using a veto clause in his original movie contract to steer his franchise toward streaming television instead.
"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," Child told Collider. He noted that the movie deal was struck in 2005 but took years to develop, with the two Cruise films ultimately wrapping in 2017.
Cruise starred as the title character in writer/director Christopher McQuarrie's "Jack Reacher" (2012) and in Edward Zwick's co-written and directed "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back" (2016). Child recalled the impact of the first film's December 2012 release: "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 the time the two-film run concluded in 2017, Child said the entertainment landscape had shifted. "Binging television had been invented. Broadband was much more widespread. It was a thing now. It was not a thing in 2005," he said, adding that streaming now offers advantages no feature film can match. "It really is. Eight 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."
Child also pointed to the financial logic behind the shift. "The finances are totally different. With a feature film, the actor attracts the money. What actor is worth a $200 million investment?" he said. "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."
That approach led to Prime Video's "Reacher," which premiered its first season in 2022 with Alan Ritchson in the lead role. Season 4 debuted on Prime Video in August and racked up 66 million global viewers in its first 28 days, prompting Amazon to grant an early Season 6 renewal. The streamer had already given the show an early Season 5 renewal back in May.
Season 5 will adapt "Make Me" (2015), the 12th book in Child's series, which follows Reacher as he hitches a train to the Midwestern town of Mother's Rest and teams up with private investigator Michelle Chang to search for her missing colleague.
Photo: BrokenSphere, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
