Amazon has landed the rights to develop a series based on Lee Child’s best-selling novel character Jack Reacher, which will be led by “Scorpion” creator Nick Santora.
Santora will serve as writer, executive producer and showrunner on the upcoming series, which was given a script-to-series to commitment by the retail giant. The series is a co-production between Amazon Studios, Skydance Television and Paramount Television, the same team behind Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” series, which has been greenlit through Season 3.
Santora will executive produce alongside Child, Don Granger and Christopher McQuarrie. David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Marcy Ross will executive produce for Skydance. Carolyn Harris will oversee the project for Skydance.
Tom Cruise starred in a pair of big-screen films based on the character — “Jack Reacher” and “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” — both of which were produced by Skydance and Cruise/Wagner and distributed by Paramount.
The first film, which was released in 2012 and directed by McQuarrie, went on to earn $218 million at the global box office (and $80 million domestically). The 2016 sequel, which saw Edward Zwick take over as director, grossed only $162 million globally, and just under $59 million in the U.S.
Last fall, Child said that he was looking to reboot “Jack Reacher” as a TV series with a new lead to replace Cruise, who he argued, “didn’t have that physicality” of the character. In his books, Child frequently describes Reacher as being 6 feet 5 inches tall, with hands “the size of dinner plates” — they have also been described as the size of “a supermarket chicken,” or “Thanksgiving turkeys.” Cruise is listed at 5 feet, 7 inches.
Jack Reacher has appeared in 23 novels from Child, along with a slew of short stories and novellas.