John McTiernan's adaptation of Clancy's 1984 novel starred Sean Connery as Soviet submarine captain Marko Ramius and Alec Baldwin playing CIA analyst Jack Ryan, who correctly hypothesizes that Ramius might be trying to defect to the U.S. McTiernan is currently serving a 12-month sentence in a minimum-security prison in South Dakota for his involvement in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping scandal.
The sequel to The Hunt for Red October sees Harrison Ford stepping into the Jack Ryan role and Anne Archer joining the cast as his surgeon wife. James Earl Jones returned as Admiral James Greer. Ryan and his family are swept into a London-set terrorist plot involving the Irish Republican Army.
The third Jack Ryan film again starred Harrison Ford as the protagonist, now the deputy director of the CIA, who confronts members of a Colombian drug cartel accused of having killed a businessman and his family who had close ties to the U.S. president. The film was directed by Phillip Noyce, who also helmed 1992's Patriot Games.
A TV movie starring Scott Bakula based on Clancy's Net Force novel series, NetForce is set in the near future — in 2005 — where the head of a new FBI division devoted to the Internet investigates the killing of his boss, leading him to a Bill Gates-type suspect, played by Judge Reinhold.
It's Ben Affleck this time playing Jack Ryan in this Phil Alden Robinson film, the fourth in the series. The reboot follows a nuclear bomb from its origins in the 1973 Yom Kippur War to Syria, where it's sold for close to nothing to a South African arms dealer who in turn sells it to Austrian neo-Nazis for a $50 million profit. Soon, the Russians are involved, and the bomb winds up planted in a Baltimore football stadium — and detonates, killing countless Americans and destroying much of the city. It was a shocking scene for a mainstream film.
The fifth entry in the Jack Ryan franchise sees Chris Pine take over in the lead role. Originally slated for Jack Bender (Lost, Alias) to direct, Kenneth Branagh took over when Bender dropped out in March 2012 due to scheduling conflicts. Branagh also appears in the film, playing Viktor Cherevin, as does Keira Knightley and Kevin Costner. The film is due in Dec. 2013.
First developed by Red Storm Entertainment for the PC in 1998, the Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six video game series was later adapted for the major gaming platforms. The game involves a tactical shooter, focusing on stealth and tactics more than just blowing away the enemy.
First introduced in 2002, the Splinter Cell games and their tie-in novels introduced Clancy fans to Sam Fisher, an agent within Third Echelon — a fictional black-ops subdivision of the NSA. There have been six versions of the game accompanied by six tie-in novels (not written by Clancy), the most recent of which is Blacklist, released in August.
In this video game series, the player oversees a squad of Special Forces stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Referred to as "the Ghosts," they are dispatched on a variety of dangerous missions. The first chapter was released in 2001 and set in 2008; the most recent, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Commander, came out in 2012 and is set in 2024.
Designed for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Windows, this real-time tactics game from 2008 is set after a nuclear attack kills 6 million people in Saudi Arabia and plunges the world into an energy crisis.
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X stands apart from the other Clancy video games for being a flight simulator alone. Released for platform gaming in 2009, it later carried over to portable device systems like iOS and BlackBerry.
The first posthumous Clancy video game will be Ubisoft Massive's Tom Clancy's The Division. The multiplayer online game is being developed for eighth generation consoles like PS4 and Xbox One as well as for PCs, and will be based on real-world events that have left society on the brink of disaster. In the game, due in the fourth-quarter of 2014, a virus spreads on Black Friday, wiping out much of the U.S. population. The player is tasked with saving whatever remains of humanity.