Michael B. Jordan's 'Without Remorse' May Go Straight To Amazon Instead Of Opening In Theaters

Amazon Studios is reportedly in final negotiations to acquire Without Remorse, the Michael B. Jordan-led action thriller based on the novel by Tom Clancy.

Paramount currently holds the distribution rights to the project and had a theatrical release planned for later this year, but if the deal goes through, Amazon is expected to drop the movie directly onto its Amazon Prime Video service. A shift to Amazon would also put this new movie alongside the company's Jack Ryan series, which stars John Krasinski and is also based on a Clancy property. Could this open the door for a crossover?

According to Variety, Paramount is in final talks to make a Without Remorse Amazon deal and sell the global rights to the movie. As the film industry has shifted toward big intellectual property-driven blockbusters and franchises in this millennium, Paramount has struggled to keep up. It has a handful of franchises — Transformers and Mission: Impossible being the standouts — but the fact that they're willing to sell off Without Remorse signals that they aren't confident that it can be one of their top-tier properties in the years to come. Perhaps they're still experiencing nightmares from 2014's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, their most recent attempt to launch a franchise in the Clancy-verse. (Reader, it did not work.)

Without Remorse is directed by Stefano Sollima (Sicario: Day of the Soldado), is written by Taylor Sheridan and Akiva Goldsman, and stars Michael B. Jordan as John Clark, an ex-Navy SEAL-turned-CIA-operative who first showed up in Clancy's novels (17 of them in total) and later appeared in multiple movies. The character was first portrayed by Willem Dafoe in Clear and Present Danger and later by Liev Schreiber in The Sum of All Fears. Those films primarily focus on Jack Ryan, but this new one will tell his origin story, following his quest for vengeance after his girlfriend is killed by a Baltimore drug lord.

The film co-stars Jamie Bell (Fantastic Four) as Robert Ritter, the CIA deputy director of operations who helped recruit Kelly into the organization, and Jodie Turner-Smith (Queen and Slim) as Karen Greer, a potential love interest for Jordan's character. Karen is a new character, but The Wire's Wendell Pierce plays Admiral Greer in the Jack Ryan series, so perhaps she's playing his daughter in this film. And again, the Amazon connection could theoretically open the door for a shared universe, with the characters from the movie and the show overlapping.

Jordan already has a relationship with Amazon, since his Outlier Society production company has a first-look TV deal set up there. And Sollima has ties with them as well, having co-created and directed last year's drug runner series ZeroZeroZero.