Hollywood's 25 Most Powerful Authors

Clancy is a one-man multimedia machine. Aside from his books (16 No. 1 New York Times bestsellers), he has co-branded three series with other writers and co-created an 18-book YA series, Net Force. Clancy has been most innovative in the field of video games, producing bookbased titles as far back as a 1987 PC version of The Hunt for Red October. In 1996, he co-founded Red Storm Entertainment, which made Clancy-branded hits Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell and was purchased by Ubisoft for an estimated $94 million in 2008. In a separate deal, Ubisoft paid Clancy about $60 million for rights to brand future games with his name. Next year will see his most famous hero rebooted in the Kenneth Branagh-directed Jack Ryan, with Chris Pine inheriting a role played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck. The author, who has kept a low profile since his 1999 headline-generating divorce and remarriage (to Alexandra Llewellyn, a family friend of Colin Powell), might be prepping for his own reboot, having recently dropped longtime agent Michael Ovitz for WME.