The director of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back has admitted the sequel didn’t work, and his comments show the movie was always on the wrong track. Many devotees of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books were vocally displeased when Tom Cruise was cast in the original movie, since he didn’t in any way match the character’s description from the books. Regardless, 2012’s Jack Reacher was a comfortable success and set up future collaborations between the star and director Christopher McQuarrie.
While the latter had planned to return for a sequel, McQuarrie dropped out of Jack Reacher 2 and was replaced by Ed Zwick, who previously worked with Cruise on 2003’s The Last Samurai. Zwick is a filmmaker who has dabbled in many genres, from rom-coms to historical epics, but a straight-ahead action movie wasn’t something he’d really tackled before. Sadly, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back earned bad reviews and weak box office, with the franchise ultimately being rebooted with Amazon’s Reacher.
“I Blame Myself”: Jack Reacher Movie Director Opens Up About Tom Cruise Box Office Flop
Director Edward Zwick opens up about Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, addressing the Tom Cruise flick’s poor box office performance and reception.
Ed Zwick’s Jack Reacher 2 Comments Prove He Was The Wrong Director
Never Go Back was a case of a director not understanding the assignment
In 2024, Zwick’s memoirs Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood were published, where he covers his lengthy career in the business. Zwick is candid about both his successes and failures, and he places the blame for Jack Reacher: Never Go Back not working on his own shoulders.
For context, Paper Moon is a charming 1973 comedy starring real-life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, about a conman who forms a bond with a girl who may or may not be his daughter. Never Go Back was based on the 18th Jack Reacher book, where the title character has to go on the run with a teenager who may – or may not – be his daughter. It’s easy to see where Zwick drew parallels between Jack Reacher 2 and Paper Moon, but this underlines he was never entirely comfortable with the genre he was working in.
At their core, the live-action Jack Reacher adaptations are intense action thrillers, and while there’s room for offbeat humor, there’s little for whimsy too. Never Go Back may have pulled the father/daughter subplot from Child’s novel, but for the movie, the blend of family drama and thriller doesn’t gel at all. It doesn’t help that Cruise and his onscreen daughter Danika Yarosh don’t share great chemistry either. While Zwick’s observation that audiences just wanted “red meat” oversimplifies the issue, his film never finds the right balance between its competing elements, and he feels bored by the movie’s thriller elements.
Never Go Back Was A Bad Choice For A Jack Reacher Sequel
It wasn’t the right time for the Jack Reacher series to tackle Book 18
In a 2022 podcast interview with Light The Fuse, McQuarrie gave his thoughts on Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. While he stayed away from offering an opinion on the quality of the sequel, McQuarrie believed it was too early for the Reacher movies to cover a story like Never Go Back. To his mind, the book was a road trip that subverted Reacher’s loner persona, but since it was only the second entry, that persona hadn’t been strongly established in the minds of audiences.
Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher Series | Budget | Box Office Gross |
|---|---|---|
Jack Reacher (2012) | $60 Million | $218,340,595 Million |
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016) | $96 Million | $162,146,076 Million |
While he thought Never Go Back could work for a third or fourth entry, McQuarrie felt the book was wrong for Jack Reacher 2. The filmmaker has a point, and it might have been better for a direct sequel to adapt a harder-edged story like Tripwire or 61 Hours before deconstructing what makes Reacher tick. Never Go Back is a pretty fine thriller novel, but there were other Reacher tales that readers would have preferred to see adapted first.
The Jack Reacher Movies Should Have Been R-Rated
Cruise and McQuarrie’s ambitions for Jack Reacher went unfulfilled
With the success of their Mission: Impossible sequels, Cruise and McQuarrie have cornered the market on PG-13 action movies. It also feels like the critical appreciation for the original Jack Reacher only grows with each passing year. That said, the film would have benefitted from an R-rating, before despite the darkness of the story, it has to pull its punches on occasion. In a 2020 chat with Empire, McQuarrie revealed he and Cruise wanted to go R-rated for Jack Reacher’s sequels.
McQuarrie was thinking of a darker tale for his version of Jack Reacher 2, like Worth Dying For, which features some of the best villains of the series. In a sense, the more modest budgets of the movies – at least compared to the cost of the average Mission: Impossible – seemed like a good way to cater to an R-rated niche. As Amazon’s Reacher has proved, the stories worked better without a filter, and McQuarrie and his star wanted their Jack Reacher films to harken back to the thrillers of the ’70s.
A sequel with an R-rating could have helped it stand out among a sea of samey PG-13 blockbusters too. Even so, Paramount insisted on a softer rating, so instead of leaning into the brutality of Child’s work, Zwick’s Never Go Back took another step away from them.
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back Killed The Franchise Early
Hopes of a Jack Reacher 3 were quickly dashed
By the time Jack Reacher: Never Go Back arrived in theaters in 2016, there were over 20 novels in the series. A Tom Cruise-fronted Reacher franchise could have run for years, but the icy response to the sequel stopped them dead. Not only did it cost more to produce, but Never Go Back’s $162 million gross (via Box Office Mojo) failed to match the original by some margin. This signaled to Paramount that a Jack Reacher 3 with Tom Cruise wasn’t worth pursuing, which prompted the development of Amazon’s show shortly after.
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back Topped Netflix In 2023
The sequel still has its followers
Zwick is too talented of a director to make a movie completely devoid of merit, so fans of the character should still give his 2016 sequel a shot. Never Go Back has a great supporting turn by Cobie Smulders, a couple of crunchy fight sequences and is at least aiming for a more emotionally engaging story than the average action thriller. In September 2023, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back topped the Netflix charts, giving those who missed it in theaters a chance to make up their own minds.
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is the sequel to the 2012 original based on the Novel by Lee Child. Finally trying to meet face to face with his support over the years, Jack heads to Washington to meet Major Susan Turner, only to discover that she has been accused of treason and arrested. Jack quickly deduces that she is being framed – and after helping her escape, the two team up to get to the center of a deadly government conspiracy.
- Release Date
- October 21, 2016
- Director
- Edward Zwick
- Cast
- Tom Cruise , Danika Yarosh , Robert Knepper
- Studio(s)
- Paramount Pictures
- Franchise(s)
- Jack Reacher
