The 2012 action flick Jack Reacher was a delightful surprise. Before Christopher McQuarrie delivered a smashing Mission Impossible sequel, he and Tom Cruise knocked it out of the park with Jack Reacher, a straightforward throwback thriller with well-crafted suspense, visceral action beats and Cruise delivering one of his trusty performances as World's #1 Action Hero in the role of the titular ass-kicker who roams from town to town, solving crimes and kicking ass.
We knew the studio was looking to move forward on Jack Reacher 2 soon, but now we've got an actual timeframe. Paramount and Skydance have set October 21, 2016 release date for the sequel. Though McQuarrie won’t return, round two will re-team Cruise with his The Last Samurai director Ed Zwick. Marshall Herskovitz, who previously collaborated with Zwick on Last Samurai and Love & Other Drugs, is attached to re-write Richard Wenk’s original script.
Wenk’s script was adapted from author Lee Child’s Never Go Back, the 18th
installment in the Jack Reacher series. In it, Reacher heads back to his old Virginia military base to find that his new commanding officer has been arrested, and he stands accused of assault and fathering a child, neither of which he can remember. Then he starts kicking ass and detecting truths.
Steve recently sat down with Zwick to talk about his new drama Pawn Sacrifice, where Zwick described the film as a "Standalone" film saying, "He gets involved in something very different in each of those books with a different cast of character and a different set of circumstances of things that happen to him." With the first film, McQuarrie laid out a really solid foundation for a series (even if Jack Reacher didn't perform quite as well as the studios hoped), so hopefully Zwick isn't planning to diverge too far.
