The title role in Amazon's Jack Reacher series will be played by Titans's Alan Ritchson. The series, in development for Amazon Prime Video since July of 2019, is a co-production between Amazon Studios, Paramount TV Studios, and Skydance TV.
The show is an adaptation of a series of mystery novels by British author Lee Child. Jack Reacher is a former major and military policeman in the U.S. Army, who opts to become a rootless wanderer after his discharge, and proceeds to get into trouble wherever he goes. Published at least once a year since 1997, the Reacher series has sold over 100 million books as of 2019. The first season of Amazon's Jack Reacher is planned to adapt the storyline of the first Reacher novel, 1997's Killing Floor, in which Reacher is arrested for murder in a small town in Georgia due to a case of mistaken identity.
Nick Santora (Scorpion, Breakout Kings, The Sopranos) is attached to the first season as writer, executive producer, and showrunner. Other executive producers include Lee Child, Don Granger, Scott Sullivan, Christopher McQuarrie, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Marcy Ross. Jack Reacher is the second Amazon series based on a book series from the Skydance/Paramount collaboration, after Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan.
Ritchson is a former model and musician who branched out into acting following an appearance in the third season of American Idol. In addition to his current role on Titans, where he plays the football player turned superhero Hank "Hawk" Hall, he has appeared in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the 2014 Michael Bay Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot, Black Mirror, and Smallville. In the latter role, Ritchson was the first actor to ever play Aquaman in a live-action production. Ritchson will reportedly continue to appear on Titans while working on Jack Reacher.
Amazon's show is the third live-action adaptation of the Reacher series, after the 2012 Tom Cruise feature film Jack Reacher, based off of the 2005 novel One Shot, and its 2016 sequel, named after and based on the 2013 novel Never Go Back. While both films were modest box office successes, Never Go Back's poor critical reception and relative financial underperformance (it "only" made $192 million on a $60 million budget) ended up nixing plans to turn Jack Reacher into a tentpole franchise for Paramount.
It's worth noting that Cruise's role as Reacher was and is known as being one of the stranger mismatches between character and actor in a Hollywood adaptation. Cruise is notoriously short, while Reacher is always described in the books as looking like an angry shaved bear. Dwayne Johnson was up for the part of Reacher at one point—which is really the sort of actor one should have in mind for Reacher; anyone who doesn't have his own zip code need not apply—but was passed over and ended up making the fifth Fast and the Furious movie instead. Ritchson, who's 6'4" and 235 pounds, is physically more in line with Reacher as the books present him.
Source: Deadline