Tom Cruise won’t be in the show Photo : Jack Reacher ( Paramount )

Back in July, we reported that Amazon was expanding its Jack-verse (which currently contains the Tom Clancy-branded Jack Ryan series) with a show based on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books—which were previously adapted into two forgettable Tom Cruise movies. Today, Amazon announced that it’s moving forward with a Jack Reacher TV show, announcing that Scorpion’s Nick Santora will be showrunner and executive producer and that the first season will be an adaptation of Child’s first Jack Reacher book, The Killing Floor. In a statement, Santora noted that Child “has been there, and will continue to be there, to help guide us along the way in this series,” so it should theoretically be a bit closer to the books than the Cruise movies were (that’s a thinly veiled reference to how much shorter Cruise is than what Reacher is supposed to be in the books).


Amazon’s press release about the show doesn’t mention Jack Ryan or the potential for confusing viewers about these different spy thriller shows with similar names, but that’s probably not as much of a problem as it seems like it could be. After all, if someone wants to watch one show about a military-type guy named Jack doing cool stuff, there’s no reason to think they won’t watch the other one.