Cracking that script just isn't getting any easier, and despite a revolving door of high-profile screenwriters attached to the project, Paramount has admitted defeat on the Chris Pine-starring Jack Ryan reboot for the time being.
Plans to get it before the cameras in February of this year obviously came to nothing, and the studio's immediate agenda for Pine is now to get him back on the bridge of the Enterprise, meaning it'll be some time before the tentatively-titled Moscow gets underway.** Star Trek 2** is due to shoot in the autumn for a summer 2012 release.
It does mean though, that Paramount are keen to get Ryan Begins right, rather than rushing into production with a script that nobody's confident in, and hoping that it'll come together during filming. Hossein Amini (The Four Feathers) started the screenplay ball rolling, before newcomer Adam Cozad came aboard charged with retooling his non-Ryan original script, at that time titled Dubai. Then Anthony Peckham (Invictus, Sherlock Holmes) was hired to give it a polish, then Cozad came back, and then Steve Zaillian (Clear and Present Danger) was tasked with a draft, only to get cold feet and pull out again.
It's enough to make even an invincible CIA action dad call it quits and go home. Paramount are now interviewing other writers to take over the story, which as far as we know at the moment, finds Ryan just out of the Marines, before he joins the CIA, working as a financial consultant for a Russian billionaire, and getting framed in a terrorist plot. Despite being based on none of Tom Clancy's novels, it apparently does feature the NATO-exercise helicopter crash mentioned in The Hunt For Red October, which saw Ryan invalided out of the Marine Corps.
Lost's Jack Bender is still attached direct, but there are rumblings that the delays may change that...