Has George Clooney finally found a way to stop robbing casinos to support his passion projects? Maybe! Earlier this week, the Daily Beast’s Kim Masters reported that he had expressed an interest in portraying Jack Ryan, should Paramount ever decide to revive the Tom Clancy character “for some commercial maintenance.†Now, according to Anne Thompson, the studio and the producer, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, are currently expecting a script from writer Hossein Amini (Killshot) with the working title Untitled Tom Clancy Project (hey, it’s catchier than A Clear and Present Danger).
This excites us, not because we’d like to see more movies like Sum of All Fears, obviously, but because a rebooted Clancy franchise would easily underwrite films from Clooney and Steven Soderbergh’s Section Eight productions (like Syriana; Good Night, and Good Luck; and this fall’s great-looking The Informant!) and allow the pair to stop footing bills with Ocean’s Eleven sequels, which they’re almost certainly sick of by now (we sort of are). Even better, won’t it be funny to see Clooney pocket giant paychecks from huge blockbusters espousing the virtues of the military-industrial complex, then turn around and produce a dozen small movies on all the reasons such things are terrible?
Sony Drops Pitt for Clooney? [Daily Beast]
Clancy Update: Untitled Script Due Soon [Thompson on Hollywood/Variety]