They also added a small subplot involving a dog.
#ALL JACK REACHER MOVIES IN ORDER TV#
For the TV series, Santora and his writers imported a key character from other novels. Having the creator on tap was handy, especially when it became clear that filling an eight-episode arc would require beefing up the plot of “Killing Floor.” The novel has Reacher - who is essentially homeless and rambles around the country, mostly by bus, with just the clothes on his back and a toothbrush - stumbling into some very bad people in a fictional Georgia town. “I want to be as authentic as possible,” he said, “and I don’t want to be ridiculed by the many die-hard fans who are going to remember that detail from the book and think that we got it wrong.”Īnd when there was any uncertainty, Santora had access to the ultimate authority: Child himself, who was an executive producer and involved in the entire process. Ritchson, who had done his homework, came to the role of a similar mind. There’s this very nice simplicity to the man, even though he’s a complex character.” Don’t ever have Reacher treat a woman as a second-class citizen because she might be smaller than he is - the truth is, everyone’s smaller than he is. “Don’t ever ask for cream and sugar in Reacher’s coffee he drinks black coffee. “We had a list of do’s and don’ts,” Santora said. A major appeal of the Reacher books is their familiarity: Over the years, they have amassed a canon of beloved recurring details, and it was important for the TV team to get them right. Am I going to be enough?”įinding an actor who would be credible as an imposing, hyper-analytical, seemingly indestructible ex-military police officer - a man who doesn’t technically have superpowers but might as well - was an important box to check, but not the only one. “He’s lived with this character for 25 years. “Meeting Lee was one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of my life,” he said in a joint call with Child. And intimidated - not usual for a man his size. And that was down to Alan, principally - not to make him too bigheaded.”Īs for Ritchson, 39, he was downright starry-eyed. As the production advanced, he could see that “it was turning out better than I could dream.” “Before I was a writer, I worked nearly 20 years in television, so I know what goes on,” Child said in a recent video call. “But that doesn’t mean that Tom Cruise didn’t do a fantastic job,” Santora quickly added.Įnter Alan Ritchson, a 6-foot-3-inch actor with biceps the size of Serrano hams, fresh from three seasons of playing the crime-fighting Hawk on the “Titans” series. It was always a conversation that he would be big - we needed to find an actor that fits the books. “When I sat down with the studio, we just started talking about Reacher’s epic and mythical size. “I know a lot of people had their thoughts on the movies,” said Nick Santora, the series’ showrunner.
#ALL JACK REACHER MOVIES IN ORDER SERIES#
The creators of the new Amazon series “Reacher,” based on the first book, “Killing Floor,” from 1997, were aware that they had to get that sheer mass right or risk displeasing fans, who were largely skeptical, to put it mildly, of Tom Cruise’s casting in two earlier Reacher adaptations. Reacher is a 6-foot-5-inch bruiser who clocks in at around 250 pounds, most of that muscle. But ask any of them the first thing that comes to mind about Reacher and the answer is likely to be that he’s big. Their readers form a surprisingly wide-reaching bunch and include novelist Margaret Drabble and “His Dark Materials” author Philip Pullman. Hatched by British writer Lee Child, Reacher has so far righted wrongs in 26 novels and a slew of short stories the books have collectively sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. Alan Ritchson is Jack Reacher in the new Amazon series "Reacher." Photo: Amazon Studios via AP