There's One Jack Reacher Book Alan Ritchson Wants To Adapt More Than Any Other [Exclusive]

Alan Ritchson finally gave fans a Jack Reacher they recognized when he debuted in Amazon Prime Video's 2022 series "Reacher." At the time, there was no way to know whether the show would be a success. After all, fans had made clear they had very specific expectations when it came to a live-action depiction of their favorite former military police officer. Let's just say there was a reason Tom Cruise wasn't cast in the TV series after portraying Reacher in two movies. Luckily, the Ritchson-led show proved incredibly popular, breaking Prime Video audience records.

Anyone who's read Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels (of which there are 28 alongside multiple short stories) will know that the titular character is a tough guy's tough guy. An unstoppable force of a man who stands at 6 foot 5 and weighs 250 pounds. And having bulked up for Amazon's show, the 6 foot 3 Ritchson was about as close as you could get to matching the character's imposing physicality.

But bulking up wasn't the only prep the "Titans" actor did for his debut as Jack Reacher. In 2022, he spoke to /Film, in an interview where he discussed prepping for the role and his favorite one-liner. The 40-year-old also revealed that he'd read all 24 books before shooting began and "fell in love with what Lee Child has done." Since then, Amazon has renewed "Reacher" for a second season, which will debut in the near future, and is confirmed to be adapting the 11th novel in Child's series, "Bad Luck And Trouble."

The inaugural season of "Reacher" was based on the first Jack Reacher novel, "Killing Floor," with showrunner Nick Santora staying faithful to Lee Child's vision throughout his live-action adaptation. That meant the show was very familiar to fans of the book series, who will have an adaptation of the 11th novel, "Bad Luck And Trouble," to look forward to with season 2. But Ritchson has some ideas for future seasons. In his /Film interview, he said:

"Not every 'Reacher' book would translate well to screen, I think, but there's only a few. The rest of them, I desperately want to make. 'Killing Floor' I loved, and I understood right away why this is done so well. 'Die Trying,' the second book I picked up, was full of so many of the attributes that I think both translate well to film and that I would just have a lot of fun bringing to life. I hope at some point we get to do 'Die Trying.'"

After the events of "Killing Floor," 1998's "Die Trying" finds Reacher, alone as usual, wandering Chicago where he stops to help a young woman with her laundry bags. Naturally, things go south from there as he and the girl are kidnapped and bundled into a van that's "racing across America," according to the official synopsis, which continues: 

Reacher doesn't know why they've been kidnapped. The woman claims to be FBI. She's certainly tough enough. Will raw courage be enough to overcome the hopeless odds?

Of course it will — it's Jack Reacher! As things progress, Reacher finds himself facing off against a radical militia who want to secede from the US, before foiling a plot to detonate a van full of dynamite in San Francisco. Classic Jack Reacher stuff.

Ritchson also previously expressed a desire to adapt the 10th book in the original series, "The Hard Way." That novel also finds Reacher embroiled in a kidnapping, this time from the outside as he tries to help rescue the abducted wife and stepchild of a private military company director.

With a much grander scope than "Killing Floor," both "Die Trying" and "The Hard Way" seem tailor-made for screen adaptations. And judging by Ritchson's taste in the novels, it seems the actor is keen to take Reacher to bigger and more grandiose places in future. But with "Reacher" season 2 already confirmed to have cast several actors as NYPD cops, it looks as though the second round of episodes have already upped the ante. Whereas the first season took place in a small Georgia town, the second seems to have taken the California-based story of "Bad Luck And Trouble" and moved it to the Big Apple, where we're sure to see Reacher dealing with a much grander threat and higher stakes.

And with the story focusing on members of Reacher's former military police unit being killed off and disappeared, there's sure to be an emotional element to the story that will likely have the hulking protagonist worked up enough to hand out some serious punishment that might even outdo his prison fight from the first season. And if the grander scale proves as popular for the series as the small-town conspiracy formula from the first eight episodes did, there's every reason we can expect to see "Die Trying" adapted at some point.