Paramount Home Media's Jack Reacher Heads Home On May 7

Director Christopher McQuarrie’s film adaptation of the Lee Child’s 2005 best seller, “One Shot,” will be heading to the home entertainment market place on May 7 courtesy of Paramount Home Media Distribution.   

Retitled for theatrical release as simply Jack Reacher (McQuarrie prepped the screenplay — which is his strong suit, having won the Oscar in 1996 for his Original Screenplay of The Usual Suspects).   The film pulled in a tasty $79.7 million during domestic theatrical run … the ARR works out to 137 days.

Paramount has a stand-alone DVD SKU in the mix, as well as a Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack (with UltraViolet) edition planned for the Jack Reacher home entertainment launch.

As the Christmas season theatrical release date approached you could hear this drumbeat building from certain sources saying that Tom Cruise wasn’t right for Child’s Jack Reacher, a man of considerable height and weight (something like six-foot-five and 240 pounds).   Of course that’s not Tom Cruise.

What the naysayers failed to take into consideration was the writing skills of Christopher McQuarrie, who delivered the aforementioned The Usual Suspects, plus wrote a top-notch thriller for Tom Cruise with Valkyrie and saved Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (even though the WGA took the screen credit away from him).   

Jack Reacher, starring Tom Cruise, is a slick (in a positive sense), well-produced, well-written thriller and five minutes into it you don’t give a rip if the novel version of Jack Reacher has lost 10 inches in height and 80 pounds in body mass.   If Cruise and McQuarrie want to reteam for a series of Jack Reacher-based thrillers … go for it.

As a reward for delivering both a successful screenplay and a well-directed action film (a commercial success), Christopher McQuarrie will be writing and directing the next Mission: Impossible entry (tentative for 2015) and he delivered the screenplay for Cruise’s next big action film, All You Need is Kill (March of next year). 

As to bonus goodies, which are all exclusive to the Blu-ray SKU, there are two commentary options — one teaming McQuarrie with Cruise, while the second features composer Joe Kraemer — plus a trio of featurettes: “When the Man Comes Around,” “You Do Not Mess with Jack Reacher: Combat & Weapons” and “The Reacher Phenomenon.”

To download this week's complete edition of the DVD and Blu-ray Release Report: DVD & Blu-ray Release Report