Is a Debt of Honor Movie Really a Good Idea? Considering the Clancy Brand Name

In considering the idea of a Debt of Honor movie from a commercial point of view one might as well start with the brand Hollywood is cashing in on with its Ryanverse products--the Tom Clancy name.

That name's heyday, clearly, was the '80s, when Tom Clancy was the highest-selling American novelist of his decade, with two of his novels the bestselling book of the year in two consecutive years (The Cardinal of the Kremlin in 1988, Clear and Present Danger in 1989), and the second of them the bestselling novel of the whole decade, while his star was only slightly dimmed during the '90s. However, that changed pretty quickly after the turn of the century--after which Clancy's output, which was the more prolific for the then-vast output of other "co-authored" books, fiction and nonfiction that he produced, halted in the early years of the next century (with the last of the original run 2003's The Teeth of the Tiger).

Of course, the Ryan books continue with the help of co-authors Grant Blackwood, Mark Greaney, Peter Telep, and others, and they seem to have had their audience. (You can find them on the paperback rack at the supermarket or in the convenience store.) Still, that leaves them a long way from the peak of Clancy's bestsellerdom--perhaps just another franchise on auto-pilot cashing in on the readiness of a dwindling base of fans left over from the boom times to have the same old stuff served up for them one more time. After all, the audience for print action thrillers collapsed in the '90s--the paperback Mack Bolan-type adventures, the hardback Robert Ludlum-style shoot 'em ups, and certainly the military techno-thrillers that from the start were hugely atypical for popular fiction in a way that likely contributed to their especially sharp decline. (In spite of the pieties that people who never write a word love to spout about "good fiction" being character fiction first, last and always, character, Character, CHARACTER! until it is coming out of your ears, most of the stuff on the racks is not really strong on character, as either subject or driver of events. But it does tend to at least focus on a character as it presents an easy-to-follow read, whereas techno-thrillers like Clancy's were so often sprawling, big-picture stuff, full of subplots and minor viewpoint characters there just to show some key bit of the action, and in a "Jack Ryan" novel Ryan himself is apt to get lost from view for long stretches amid all that. Indeed, I could add that the books could often be a "slow burn" in their long build-ups, were prone to be information-heavy, and often quite impersonal and dry for many tastes.)

All this seems the more the case given that it does not seem that many are picking up the older Clancy novels these days. On Goodreads, it seems, Debt of Honor has 47,000 ratings--given prior use of the site to assess these things, about what I would expect for a bestseller of that time that no one picks up much in the Internet era. Which, again, is what I would expect even if the genre did not suffer such a decline, simply because the half-life of popular fiction tends to be so short, with, again, thriller fiction of all kinds particularly suffering. (For example, how many read Robert Ludlum today--especially anything but The Bourne Identity because they saw the movies? From what I can tell, very few indeed.)

Of course, if the print Ryanverse has to all evidences seen its star fall a long way the franchise continues to exist in other media. The films made from Clancy's books were generally judged hits--but how has interest in them held up? It does not seem unfair to say that Alec Baldwin was deemed dispensable after The Hunt for Red October, and that Harrison Ford's Jack Ryan is a long way from Han Solo or Indiana Jones in cultural cachet. Moreover, since The Sum of All Fears in 2002, after which no one saw fit to give Ben Affleck another "go" at the character, we have had two decades in which we have seen only two major feature films based on Clancy's work, namely 2015's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (which ended up a lower-budgeted January dump month release), and 2021's Without Remorse (which went straight to streaming amid the pandemic). In spite of having cast relatively well-liked leads (Chris Pine isn't usually regarded as the worst Chris, and the press usually loves Michael B. Jordan), they do not seem to have been hits, or left much impression, all as Jack Ryan was relegated to the small screen (and is now played by that guy from The Office who always stared at the camera with that insufferably smug expression on his face). The show has presumably done fairly well there, but all the same it is not a shift of that incarnation of the character from the small screen to the big they are talking about--just as they are not trying to capitalize on the strength of the Clancy name where it may be most prominent, gaming, as they might have with a Ghost Recon or Splinter Cell movie, but, apparently, resurrecting Ford's 90s-era Ryan.

The result is that Ford, more than Clancy, is the name of importance here--the wisdom of which decision remains to be seen. People may still be up for seeing Ford play Indiana Jones, if only out of nostalgia--this, in fact, seems to me one of the few things that Indiana Jones 5 has in its favor--but Ford is less closely identified with Ryan than that figure, that draw just not nearly as strong. Moreover, even with Jones we will see it tested when Dial of Destiny hits theaters this June. Should that movie not do so well as hoped--and it seems to me that between the colossal budget and the many strikes against it there is a good chance it will be seen as less than a roaring success--we may see Hollywood's enthusiasm for this project cool off in a hurry.