'Sherlock Holmes' Screenwriter Tapped To Rewrite Paramount's Jack Ryan Reboot

Anthony Peckham is one of the credited screenwriters on last year's Sherlock Holmes reinvention and now he's going to have his name on Paramount's reinvention of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan character, too. Peckham has been hired to polish up the draft of the script that will put Star Trek's Chris Pine into Jack Ryan's shoes.THR says that Peckham is helping to "prep the project for take-off," the 'project' being the film so far called Moscow, in which Chris Pine will play a younger version of Jack Ryan. The first draft of the script was by Hossein Amini, with Adam Cozen rewriting, seemingly incorporating elements of a previous script of his called Dubai.

What we've known in the past is that, in this take, "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."

I'm not sure if this is good news or not. I liked Sherlock Holmes well enough, but would never say that the script was the strong point of the film. In fact, cast people other than Robert Downey, Jr. (so skilled at going off-book) and Jude Law, and Sherlock very possibly falls apart.

But Peckham is only one of a handful of credited writers, and there are very possibly other uncredited writers whose work formed the basis for that script. So I'm not going to fall into the trap of blaming Peckham for the weakness of Sherlock's script. He also got sole credit for adapting John Carlin's novel for Invictus, so factor that in.

THR's report, incidentally, also confirms that frequent Lost director Jack Bender is attached to direct, though the site's language is just that — Bender is attached, rather than signed.