The much-delayed Jack Ryan reboot finally shot at the end of last year, with Kenneth Branagh both directing and taking on the villainous role of Russian oligarch Viktor Cherevin. Chris Pine is the youthful Mr Ryan, with Kevin Costner on mentor duties as CIA veteran William Harper. To tide us over until the marketing machine really starts to kick in, a couple of new images have just surfaced at USA today.

There's something about that first image that really does ram home how young Ryan is this time. This is very much not the action dad of previous outings; he's even more fresh-faced than Ben Affleck in The Sum Of All Fears. The story finds Ryan just out of the Marines, before he joins the CIA, working as a financial consultant and getting framed in a terrorist plot. It's not based on any of Tom Clancy's novels, but is still striving to remain canonical, and apparently does feature the NATO-exercise helicopter crash mentioned in The Hunt For Red October, which saw Ryan invalided out of the Marine Corps.

The other shot meanwhile, gives us another look at a uniformed Costner. Could he be in recruitment mode here, proferring a welcome-to-the-agency handshake? Costner, incidentally, was enthusiastically courted by Paramount to play the original Jack Ryan in Red October, but his commitment to Dances With Wolves meant the role went to Alec Baldwin. So in another universe, this shot would almost look like a torch-passing moment. Costner may also show up as Harper in another Clancy adaptation, the non-Ryan Without Remorse, although he was cagey about this when Empire spoke to him on set...

Jack Ryan's screenplay went through the hands of Hossein Amini, Adam Cozad, Anthony Peckham, Steve Zaillian, and David Koepp, who was still holding it when the music stopped. Lorenzo di Bonaventura is among the producers, and the film is scheduled to hit cinemas next Christmas.