‘Reacher’ Creator Officially Eyes Another Spin-Off After ‘Neagley’s 40-Million-Viewer Success
Jack Reacher has proven that audiences just love watching a big guy dunk on someone with their fists, but while Reacher has become one of Prime Video’s biggest action franchises, it turns out audiences are more than happy to watch somebody else do the fighting too. The franchise’s first spin-off has already become an enormous success, and with Lee Child continuing to expand the world of his bestselling novels, there could be even more stories waiting to be told.
Neagley has proven that you don’t need Alan Ritchson to make a Reacher show a success, having attracted 40 million viewers worldwide in its first 13 days, according to figures released by Prime Video. The show follows Maria Sten‘s Coco Pops-loving Frances Neagley, the former military investigator who has become one of the franchise’s most popular characters. The show’s already been renewed for a second season, such is the faith shown in it by Amazon.
The spin-off follows Neagley as she investigates the suspicious death of a close friend from her past, drawing on the skills she developed while serving alongside Jack Reacher in the Army’s 110th Special Investigations Unit. But while she shares Reacher’s determination to see justice served, Neagley has her own approach to dealing with dangerous criminals, and she’s more than capable of handling herself without her former commanding officer.
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Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
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Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
Could ‘Reacher’ Get Another Spin-Off?
Speaking exclusively with Collider for the release of Chain Reaction, the latest Jack Reacher novel, Child revealed that he believes Susan Turner could be the perfect candidate for another Prime Video spin-off. The character, previously played by Cobie Smulders in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, returns in the new book with a much more powerful position in the military, and Child believes that could give Amazon another opportunity to expand the franchise.
“I was glad that Andrew brought back Susan Turner. Good character, but also a spin-off opportunity because we’ve already got Neagley, and Amazon tends to want as much as possible if it’s working. And so, do they want another spin-off? In which case, she’ll do.“
“I was glad that Andrew brought back Susan Turner. Good character, but also a spin-off opportunity because we’ve already got Neagley, and Amazon tends to want as much as possible if it’s working. And so, do they want another spin-off? In which case, she’ll do.”
Turner now commands CSA G-99 Section, an elite military investigative organization that’s essentially the successor to Reacher’s original 110th Special Investigators. Essentially, she’s running the Army’s own FBI, which could provide the perfect setting for another crime thriller without needing Reacher to appear in every episode.
Andrew Child, who’s now writing the Reacher novels in conjunction with his brother, also explained why bringing Turner back made sense for the novels, particularly when it comes to finding believable reasons for Reacher to become involved in another dangerous investigation.
“One of the main issues that, from a practical point of view, we have is, and this gets harder with every installment, you always need a mechanism, like a hook, to bring him into the story. Some sort of coincidence. He happens to be in the place where these bad guys are doing this thing again. So we have to be really careful not to make that part too incredible.”
</blockquote>“One of the main issues that, from a practical point of view, we have is, and this gets harder with every installment, you always need a mechanism, like a hook, to bring him into the story. Some sort of coincidence. He happens to be in the place where these bad guys are doing this thing again. So we have to be really careful not to make that part too incredible.”
Reacher and Neagley are streaming exclusively on Prime Video.
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