Streaming giant Amazon announced yesterday (April 24) that it’s already renewing Jack Ryan for a second season, even though the first has yet to air.
Variety reports that John Krasinski will now step out as the fictional CIA operative for a further eight episodes, after the first eight have been released. Casting him has turned out to be a masterstroke: not only does his stint as Jim Halpert in The Office mean he encapsulates the “everyman” perfectly, but his directorial debut A Quiet Place has recently been a box office hit.
John is the latest actor to play the character, after Chris Pine, Ben Affleck and Harrison Ford. Then of there’s Alec Baldwin, who played him on screen in 1990 in The Hunt for Red October. In fact, the intelligence analyst has had almost as many incarnations as his British counterpart.
Billed as Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, the new series will see a return to Jack’s roots, as outlined in the series of bestselling novels by Tom Clancy. Season one will apparently focus on Jack as an up-and-coming analyst “thrust into a dangerous field assignment for the first time” and facing a “new breed of terrorism,” while the description for season two says he’ll face “the forces in power in a dangerous, declining democratic regime in South America.”
And it looks like the character is as popular as ever. Amazon said they noticed a “400 per cent rise” in the number of people signing up to their streaming service after the trailer (below) aired during this year’s Super Bowl:
Jack Ryan debuts on August 31, 2018.
Are you excited to see John as Jack Ryan?