The best and worst Jack Ryan adaptations according to IMDb

Since the 1990s The Hunt for Red October, Tom Clancy has been frequently chosen for film and television adaptations. The late author’s signature tech espionage and cat-and-mouse geopolitics naturally transitioned to the big screen, and the success of Red October spawned an entire Clancy franchise.

However, as is often the case, the quality of these adaptations has fluctuated over the years, with some absolute highs and equally notable lows. This is especially true of movies and series centered around Jack Ryan, Clancy’s frequent hero. The vast majority of Clancy adaptations have featured Jack Ryan, with five different actors playing him in major projects since Alec Baldwin first donned the mantle of CIA analyst in 1990. But how do these different versions relate to each other? And which is definitely the best?

To answer these questions, we turn to the fans. All series and movies of Jack Ryan currently has over 100,000 user ratings on IMDb, giving us a pretty good idea of ​​how viewers feel about each version. The Hunt for Red October is, as you’d expect, number one, but it’s actually number one Jack Ryan’s only TV shownot one of the movies. As of this writing, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan — the Prime Video series starring John Krasinski as the eponymous character — has an 8.0 rating out of 182,000 user ratings, giving it a gold medal. Given the show’s positive reception and its impressive design, this isn’t all that surprising. But how are films made?

Right behind Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan in the IMDb rankings is The Hunt for Red October, the movie that started it all. Released in theaters six years after Clancy’s original novel was released in 1984, the film quickly eclipsed the book in terms of widespread cultural recognition, thanks in large part to Sean Connery’s extraordinary performance as Russian submarine captain Mark Ramius. The film holds a 7.5 on IMDb out of 220,000 ratings, while its Metacritic score, which consists solely of critical reviews, is much lower at 58/100.

Red October is followed by two Harrison Fords in the IMDb rankings Jack Ryan movieswho directly followed Baldwin as a character. 1994’s “Clear and Present Danger” has a 6.9 rating out of 111,000 ratings, narrowly edging out its 1992 predecessor, “Patriot Game,” which has a 6.8.

These three also have the highest Metacritic scores of any Jack Ryan film, but the order is slightly different. “Clear and Present Danger” has the highest score with 72, “Patriot Games” is second with 64, and “The Hunt for Red October” dropped from first to third with 58. Obviously, opinions on these films are monolithic, but most viewers agree that they all eclipse the films that came later.

After Harrison Ford starred in two films as Jack Ryan, the franchise tried to keep it alive in the 21st century with a new, younger star in the role. The role eventually went to Ben Affleck, who was a top Hollywood A-lister in 2002 when The Sum of All Fears premiered. The studio teamed up Affleck with Morgan Freeman in a duo of quite big names, but the film did not achieve the same level of recognition as its predecessors.

The movie currently has a 6.5 user rating on IMDb — not much worse than Patriots Games’ 6.8. However, the film also has a much lower Metacritic score of 45 and corresponding Rotten Tomatoes numbers of 59% approval rating from critics and 49% from general moviegoers. Despite the criticism, the film did well, grossing nearly $200 million worldwide on a budget of just $68 million. However, a sequel starring Affleck was never released, and it would be more than a decade before anyone attempted another Jack Ryan movie.

That successor finally arrived in 2014, this time starring Chris Pine. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit took a different approach by creating a new story instead of adapting an existing Tom Clancy novel. The result? The franchise’s lowest IMDb score is 6.2. Given the reaction to the last two Jack Ryan movies, perhaps Amazon was smart to allow a TV series instead.