Tom Cruise is one of the biggest movie stars in the world and has been a constant for audiences, having hit films for four decades. Breaking out in the 1980s with films like Risky Business, Top Gun, and Days of Thunder, Cruise transitioned into the 90s by working with some of the best directors of all time, with Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible, and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report cementing him as one of the most dedicated actors alive.
His latest film, Top Gun: Maverick, was the surprise hit of the 2022 summer and became his highest-grossing film of all time and the first time the actor made a movie to cross $1 billion at the box office worldwide. Last year, the actor released the seventh Mission Impossible film, and he is already shooting the eighth film the popular franchise, one that has been going on since 1996. However, one franchise that Cruise tried his best to launch, Jack Reacher, just never quite clicked.
Update January 17, 2024: This article has been updated following Reacher season 2 with more information on how the series has become a hit moving beyond Tom Cruise.
The Attempted Jack Reacher Franchise
Created by author Lee Child in 1997, the Jack Reacher character has been the focus of over 28 novels. The last one, The Secret, was released less than three months ago, and the next entry, In Too Deep, will hit bookshelves in October 2024. In 2012, Cruise starred in Jack Reacher, which was based on the ninth novel, One Shot. The film received positive reviews and performed somewhat decently at the box office when it was released during the holiday season, grossing $80 million domestically and $218 million worldwide against a $60 million budget.
The film was meant to become a franchise starter, but it took over four years for Paramount Pictures to make a sequel. In 2016, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back opened in theaters and performed far lower than the previous film, with $58.7 million domestically and $162 million worldwide. That was $56 million less than its predecessor while also having a bigger budget, putting a nail in the coffin for the film series. The next year, another attempted Tom Cruise movie franchise would fall flat with the 2017 film The Mummy.
Since then, the Jack Reacher franchise has been given new life with a television show titled Reacher on Amazon Prime Video starring Alan Ritchson in the lead role. Yet one would imagine a movie star like Tom Cruise, who has headlined some of the biggest movies of all time, should have been able to take this book series and turn it into a popular film franchise. Why did it not work? A combination of Cruise's own star power hurting the project and the source material actively working against him might have been the downfall of this potential franchise.
Tom Cruise is Not Like the Books' Jack Reacher
One of the biggest contentions with Cruise's casting among fans of the book series was the star's physical appearance. In the novels, the character of Jack Reacher is described as 6 ft 5, almost a whole foot taller than Tom Cruise, who stands at 5 ft 7. The series' author defended the casting choice at the time, citing that it would be difficult to find an actor to fit Reacher's described height in the book (worth noting that Dwayne Johnson was in the running for the role, and he is the exact height as the book's character and current Reacher actor Richson is 6 ft 2). The author explained that the height was a way to characterize Jack Reacher as an unstoppable force, but the casting of Cruise was meant to play off the actor's movie star persona as an impossible man of action audiences have seen do crazy stunts for years.
Related: Will Reacher's Popularity Change the Perception of Media Masculinity?
While fidelity to the source material is respectable, it is not always the most important thing. After all, Hugh Jackman is much taller than the comic book version of Wolverine, and audiences all over the world love his version of the character just as much as the comics. Cruise himself is no stranger to not being the fan's choice for a role, as author Anne Rice was famously not happy with Cruise's casting as Lestat in 1994's Interview With A Vampire, and only changed her mind after watching the film. However, for a role like Jack Reacher, Cruise felt more like stunt casting to get a famous action star rather than finding the right actor for the role.
Tom Cruise's Star Power Made it Seem Like a Redundant Franchise
Cruise's star power, and the way Jack Reacher attempted to cash in on it, might have been one element that hurt the movie in the long run. While Tom Cruise has had a long and storied career since late 2000, the actor has mainly been defined by action roles and, in particular, the Mission: Impossible film series. That is very much Tom Cruise's franchise, and any other major action film Cruise finds himself in the lead role of will draw a comparison. Jack Reacher and Mission: Impossible have many different comparisons, as both installments of Jack Reacher were released the year after a Mission: Impossible film (and were much weaker). Jack Reacher director Christopher McQuarrie eventually moved over to the Mission: Impossible movie series to direct Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Mission: Impossible - Fallout, and Mission: Impossible 7 - Dead Reckoning Part 1 and 2.
Related: Mission: Impossible: Tom Cruise's 5 Best Stunts in the Franchise, Ranked
While going for a different type of action film (and perhaps a franchise Cruise was setting up to do after he became too old for the death-defying stunts of Mission: Impossible), audiences looked at Jack Reacher as a smaller-scale and cheaper version of a big-budget Tom Cruise action film. The franchises were different but not different enough to general audiences that Jack Reacher wouldn't look like a knock-off franchise.
Source Material Works Better As A Television Series
One of the biggest aspects of the failure of the Jack Reacher film series has less to do with Cruise and instead to do with the medium in which they chose to tell it. Jack Reacher is a 28-book series, with no signs of slowing down. The narratives are focused on one character and, in many ways, are stand-alone stories. These are airport novels, designed to be thrilling and entertaining reads without being necessarily profound. While this format can work for a film, it works particularly well for a television series, and the audiences for these types of stories tend to be older individuals who watch more television at home.
While the James Bond film franchise has successfully run for over six decades and is based on stand-alone adventures in a long-running book series, most major books that become film franchises tend to be stories with clear beginnings and endings, such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Twilight, and The Hunger Games.
The central premise of the Jack Reacher novel series sees him traveling across the United States taking odd jobs and getting involved in different cases. While that could be a good premise for a movie franchise, having a built-in new location for each feature film is also ideal for a television series. A person traveling the world and getting into adventures is a hallmark of television, from The Fugitive to The Incredible Hulk to Kung Fu. Most recently, Supernatural used that format for over 15 years. With over 28 novels to adapt, that gives the creators of Reacher plenty of seasons of television to craft.
In a weird inverse of Mission: Impossible, which originated as a television series but elevated to now being one of the biggest movie franchises because of Tom Cruise, Jack Reacher is a franchise that has likely become more popular when it was adapted as a television series without Tom Cruise.
Reacher's Season 2 Keeps Breaking Viewing Records
Reacher’s first season was a success by every metric imaginable, but this second season has to be surprising even Amazon, as the show claimed the top spot in all the streaming charts two days after it released the first three episodes and smashed the entire season viewership in those three episodes, getting watched for 1.7 billion minutes, and that was four episodes ago, so the numbers have been going up.
The show's success, as was the one by Suits, proves audiences still love a weekly drama with an episode-of-the-week structure. Yes, every chapter in Reacher advances the season-long mystery, but it's written in digestible bites with a start, a middle, and an end (and some awesome fighting sequences in between), making it an easy watch. It looks like, sometimes, audiences just want to watch a smart, giant man being the best at his job of choice and kicking ass in a weekly basis. Proof of this is the fact that Reacher already has a bigger audience than much more announced expensive Amazon projects like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
As mentioned before, there are 28 books plus some short stories written by Lee Child about the character of Jack Reacher, and the show has already been renewed for a third season, so what’s for sure is that this TV version with Alan Ritchson is working much better than the Cruise version, and audiences are going to see much more of it. Tom Cruise will keep doing impossible stunts on the big screen, and Alan Ritchson will keep killing people with one punch on the small screen. Audiences are better off having those two possibilities and deciding when to choose to see one or the other.
Reacher
Action
Crime
Drama
- Release Date
- February 4, 2022
- Creator
- Nick Santora
- Cast
- Alan Ritchson , Maria Sten , Malcolm Goodwin , Willa Fitzgerald
- Seasons
- 2
