Looks like Paramount’s long-gestating reboot of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan spy franchise is finally coming together: Vulture has learned exclusively that Lost executive producer — and frequent director — Jack Bender is a cat’s breath away from landing the job as the director of Moscow, in which a fresh-from-the-Marines Jack Ryan goes to work as an analyst for a Russian billionaire, but winds up on the run after being implicated in a terrorist plot. (Ryan is being played by another J.J. Abrams cohort, Star Trek’s Chris Pine.)
Bender is an interestingly bold choice to reboot Ryan, because while Bender’s worked in-house for Abrams on Bad Robot–produced shows like Lost, Alias, and Felicity, he actually has precious little feature experience: His most recent directing credit is the macabre 1991 slasher film Child’s Play 3 (which carried the Best. Tagline. Ever: “Look who’s stalking!â€). But then again, there’s no bigger producer on the Paramount lot than Bender’s patron, Abrams, and so he appears to be getting his shot. (In June, Abrams’s Bad Robot also signed Bender to a one-year first-look development deal that would have him developing projects and directing a pilot for Warner Bros. TV next spring, though we have no details on what that might be — yet.)
Interesting trivia: Bender’s also a lifelong painter — he actually painted that striking expressionist mural “made by†Desmond while living in the hatch. Vulture wonders what Bender will do with a much bigger canvas like, say, the silver screen.