Lee Child has now spelled out how Tom Cruise ended up as Jack Reacher. Cruise wasn’t the actor Child had pictured from the start. He came onto the adaptation through Cruise/Wagner Productions after recognizing that Child’s books had real commercial value.
The project had been in development for about six years when Christopher McQuarrie turned in a screenplay that won over the people involved and changed the shape of the adaptation. That script is what led Cruise to read it and decide he wanted to play Reacher himself. The problem was obvious. In Child’s novels, Jack Reacher is a 6’5″ drifter with a heavy build, so it’s easy to see why readers in English-speaking markets objected, even while plenty of critics praised Cruise’s intensity, control, and sheer screen presence.
If you’ve kept up with the long-running argument over the casting, Child later put it pretty bluntly. He said Cruise grasped Reacher’s inner qualities, but was physically “completely and utterly wrong.” Even so, the movies made money. Reported box office figures put the 2012 film at about $218.3 million worldwide against a $60 million budget, while 2016’s Jack Reacher: Never Go Back reached $162.1 million on a similar budget.
The closer match to the books is now on Amazon’s Reacher. Alan Ritchson’s casting makes the point fans had been making for years: Jack Reacher’s size was never some small, throwaway detail.
Author: Emmanuel Pina
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