Oh, the plight of the writer, who exists so low on the Hollywood power totem pole. They write up a script, and it gets swept away by producers and directors. If they're lucky or have some pull, they get taken along. Otherwise, it's out of their hands, either flying to the screen with the script intact, or being revamped by different writers. And, just sometimes, a legal loophole allows a literary and cinematic character to be stolen away.

Movieweb has reported that Phillip Noyce, director of Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, has heard that there are plans to bring Jack Ryan back to the big screen. The loophole allows Paramount to use the character in other films without any word from Tom Clancy. This means that we might just see Jack Ryan prancing around without the popular author's imagined landscapes and scenarios.

Why bother? Sure, Harrison Ford's Jack Ryan was a box office success, but that was as part of the film versions of Clancy's novels. If you have to go to all the effort to create a new story for an old, established character, why not just use that creativity to write up someone new? In any medium, once the original creator's vision exits stage, the audience starts murmuring sounds of protest. Eh, forget it. We should just throw all the classic icons into new settings, and I'm not talking about super heroes. How about Raskolnikov in a new college comedy, or a dead Emily Webb in a ghostly thriller?