This Thrilling Harrison Ford Movie Turned the Jack Ryan Films From a One-Off Into a Legitimate Action Franchise

While the novels in the Jack Ryan series by Tom Clancy had always been popular, the success of the feature film adaptation of The Hunt For Red October led to significantly higher level of interest in future installments in the franchise. The Hunt For Red October is a terrific Cold War thriller that showed what a genius John McTiernan was as an action storyteller, but it was a film in which the Russian captain, played by Sean Connery, ended up being a more significant character than Alec Baldwin’s depiction of Ryan. Patriot Games changed the direction of the Jack Ryan franchise by putting more emphasis on action and conspiracies. Although Clancy himself had misgivings about the film when it was initially in production, he was eventually won over by the excellent performance by Harrison Ford.