After the release of the first film poster just a day after Tom Clancy’s death, Paramount put out the first official trailer yesterday.
Starring Chris Pine, Kevin Kostner, Keira Knightley, and actor-director Kenneth Branagh, Shadow Recruit is a reboot/retelling of the familiar Jack Ryan narrative. From analyst to operative in 6 seconds flat, Jack Ryan is one of the most beloved of Clancy’s characters. So far, he has been embodied by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck, and now it’s up to reboot!Kirk to give him a new edge. Drawn out of the Cold War and into the minefield of geopolitics and cyberterrorism, Jack is going to be given a few shiny new toys and the globalised world as a playground.
Seeing as Tom Clancy wrote eight Jack Ryan novels and even five for a Jack Ryan Jr series (featuring his son), I’m not entirely clear on why another reboot was strictly necessary — but then again, an original script written by Hossein Amini is hardly something to scoff at. Ben Affleck’s turn at the character, The Sum of All Fears, was a reboot as well, functioning as a prequel to The Hunt for Red October, though it stuck with the familiar origin story. Shadow Recruit, however, seems to be giving Jack a new face entirely. We’ll see how that turns out.

Edit: a week later, an international trailer was released — slightly different and with another angle concerning Jack’s wife Kathy:

Another edit: the release date has been pushed back to January 17, 2014.