It’s kind of funny seeing how Lee Child’s Jack Reacher stories are succeeding on Amazon Prime Video, because when Hollywood took a shot at adapting the stories, they crashed and burned after only one winning feature. The streaming series Reacher is currently in production on Reacher Season 3, with viewers praising the approach to the material, and the casting of Alan Ritchson in the lead role. So, what went wrong with the movies, which had Tom Cruise in the lead (and should have worked better than they did)? If you ask Ed Zwick, the director of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, he’ll tell you that he was the problem.
Ed Zwick has written a terrific book about his film career called Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions. It’s a terrific tell-all about some major movies we grew up on, and eventually, Zwick gets to his contribution to the Jack Reacher film series. Zwick took over for Christopher McQuarrie, who actually turned Jack Reacher into a formidable adaptation of the Lee Child book One Shot. And when opening up about the experience in the book, Zwick revealed: