Can Michael B. Jordan Succeed Where Chris Pine And Ben Affleck Failed?

Can Michael B. Jordan’s Without Remorse help Paramount revive the Tom Clancy movie IP after the relative failures of Ben Affleck’s The Sum of All Fears and Chris Pine’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit?

Paramount has moved Michael B. Jordan’s Without Remorse back two weeks. The Tom Clancy adaptation will open not September 18, 2020 but rather October 2, 2020. That was the spot previously occupied by Sony’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage before the comic book sequel moved to June 25, 2021, taking the place of WB’s The Batman which itself got moved to October 2, 2021. At the time, I argued that Warner Bros. should hold that newly-available real estate should they need to push back Tenet and concurrently Wonder Woman 1984 from their current July 17 and August 14 release dates. While this doesn’t completely negate that idea, Without Remorse, starring Michael B. Jordan as John Clark, now has one of the remaining prime IMAX-friendly slots available in 2020.

As for the movie, it’ll be directed by Stefano Sollima (Sicario: Day of the Soldado) and adapted by Taylor Sheridan (the aforementioned Sicario 2 along with Hell or High Water and Wind River among others) and will be yet another attempt by Paramount to turn the Tom Clancy literary universe into a viable franchise. Yes, Amazon
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’s Jack Ryan TV show (starring John Krasinski) is pretty successful and the first season was enjoyable enough. But Ben Affleck’s The Sum of All Fears was a one-and-done, despite being relatively successful ($193 million on a $68 million budget in 2002). It was overshadowed by Matt Damon’s trendsetting The Bourne Identity ($214 million on a $60 million budget, plus rave reviews and scorching post-theatrical business) in June of that summer.

Chris Pine’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit belly-flopped in early 2014 ($135 million on a $60 million budget) just before Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier changed the MCU forever by throwing Steve Rogers into a proverbial Tom Clancy adventure that was better (and obviously better received, with $714 million worldwide) than the genuine article. That was arguably a turning point both for Marvel and for Hollywood, as the big-budget superhero films began approximating genre movies while often being better (and certainly more successful) than the straight-up genre movies. And if you wonder why I always get cranky when you folks don’t show up to John Boyega’s Pacific Rim: Uprising ($60 million domestic) and Chadwick Boseman’s 21 Bridges ($28 million domestic), it’s because Chris Pine is getting yet another action franchise, The Saint, despite showing little box office draw outside of the Star Trek movies.

For the record, Pine has arguably gone out of his way to be a supporting character in female-led and female-directed fantasy flicks like Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and Ava DeVurnay and Storm Reid’s A Wrinkle in Time.Was the Jack Ryan character/Tom Clancy universe was ever that big of a deal? Maybe audiences just really liked The Hunt for Red October ($200 million in 1990, for what was Sean Connery’s highest-profile non-James Bond movie save for The Untouchables) and then wanted to see big-budget Harrison Ford actioners like Patriot Games ($178 million in 1992) and Clear and Present Danger ($216 million in 1994). Back in the day, these kind of star+franchise pitches were more about the movie star than the source material. But now studios are banking on the IP over the far-less viable star system to carry the day.

The film will concern Clark, a Navy SEAL-turned-CIA ops officer (often the go-to field agent for ideally desk-bound analyst Jack Ryan) seeking revenge after his girlfriend is murdered by a Baltimore drug lord. That’s a distinctly… old-fashioned plot that didn’t exactly set the world on fire with American Assassin three years ago. Can Michael B. Jordan can bring in audiences to a better/greater degree that alleged stars like Chris Pine, Chris Hemsworth and the other so-called movie stars who (partially due to the changing habits of general moviegoers) can’t open a marquee character-specific franchise to save their souls? The good news is that, by today’s standards, Jordan almost has a track record. While Creed earned $173 million global in 2015, Creed II, which featured a lot less Rocky Balboa, earned $215 million three years later.

Among the dozen old-school studio programmers that Warner Bros. released over the last year to almost consistently terrible box office results, Just Mercy, starring Jordan as a civil rights attorney representing Jamie Foxx’s death row inmate, was the closest thing to a hit. The $25 million drama, co-starring Brie Larson and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), legged out to $33 million domestic and $50 million worldwide. That wasn’t a huge sum, but it earned more in North America than the far-more high profile Jojo Rabbit ($33.3 million), Hell or High Water ($28 million in 2016) and every non-franchise Chris Hemsworth film save for 12 Strong ($45 million in 2018). Heck, it earned more than Warner’s much-discussed Doctor Sleep, The Way Back and Richard Jewell.

To be fair, Hemsworth’s Rush is excellent, Reynolds scored with The Hitman’s Bodyguard and Hunnam was quite fun in The Gentlemen. Affleck’s The Accountant ($155 million global) is still a modern miracle. The comparison, especially in terms of a distinctly old-school legal drama outperforming higher-profile, Oscar-nominated and/or arguably more commercial genre flicks starring presumed movie stars like the various Hollywood Chrises, Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin and Charlie Hunnam, is about how conventional wisdom about what makes money in Hollywood can often supersede what actually makes money in Hollywood. I don’t know if Michael B. Jordan is a “butts in the seats” movie star outside of established franchises like the MCU and the Rocky Balboa movies. But I’d put more money on him than whichever (presumably) white guy they cast as The Saint or The Green Hornet.