LEE CHILD’S HAD enough experience of writing Jack Reacher to know that he’s the last person in the world who should write Jack Reacher. For the big and small screens, that is. That’s for damn sure. “Quietly, secretly, I’ve written stuff for movies,” he tells Empire. “I had a long spell of story-doctoring, and you have to got to be so brutal. You cannot do that to your own work. Book writers who do their own screenplay, it is 99 per cent guaranteed to be overlong, too baggy, not good enough.”
Of the 28 Jack Reacher novels Child has written (the four most recent ones with his brother, Andrew), four have been adapted — two as films, starring Tom Cruise, and two as Prime Video series starring Alan Ritchson. And while Child has been involved, he’s also been in the perfect position to tell us where those adaptations have gone right (and wrong) with his iconic one-man army.
JACK REACHER (2012)