Chris Pine Says Jack Ryan Is Dead Again

I guess I'm part of the problem - I never saw Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. I'm part of the reason why the film did so poorly that Chris Pine is giving the eulogy for the franchise in interviews:

No, I don’t think it made enough money for [a sequel] to happen. That’s one of my deep regrets, that we didn’t totally get that right.

It’s a great franchise, and if it’s not me then I hope it gets a fifth life at this point. It’s just great. I love the spy genre. I hope it’s done again and with a great story.

It's weird how Jack Ryan has been unable to survive the Cold War. I didn't see the latest reboot, but The Sum of All Fears is actually excellent, and that fizzled as well, dooming the Ben Affleck version of Jack Ryan to the graveyard. 

Or maybe it's not weird. Maybe Tom Clancy's signature character is just a creature of the Cold War, an artifact from a time when the CIA could be good guys (by which I mean a very small window in the 80s) because the threat was so large and amorphous - the KGB and its various evil apparatus! That stuff doesn't quite fly the same way anymore, and while James Bond has been able to find its footing by bringing back fake global evil spy groups, we live in a post-Zero Dark Thirty world where Jack Ryan just seems naieve. 

Which is a bummer, because all I want from the Jack Ryan movies is to get up to the novels where Ryan becomes president. These are crazy books, filled with nutbag politics that seem tame by modern Tea Party standards, but make for bizarre reading nonetheless. I wanted to get to Debt of Honor, where Japanese terrorists crash a plane into the State of the Union address, wiping out the American government. How awesome would that be in a movie? But at this point it seems like we'll never see it.