Every Tom Clancy Movie, Ranked According To Rotten Tomatoes

Tom Clancy is one of the world’s best-selling authors of spy fiction. His novels have sold more than 100 million copies total and inspired numerous adaptations. Licensed video games such as Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege have amassed tens of millions of players, and the Amazon Prime series Jack Ryan has a third season in the works.

In addition to those, several films have been released based on Clancy’s work, with two more (based on the books Without Remorse and Rainbow Six) in development. For this list, we’ve ranked the entire “Ryanverse” franchise according to each entry’s individual Rotten Tomatoes score.

5 Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) – 55%

The most modern adaptation of Tom Clancy’s work yet, 2014’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit was directed by Kenneth Branagh and stars Chris Pine as the eponymous CIA agent. The film — which is not based on an existing Clancy novel, but rather an original story — follows Ryan as he discovers a terrorist plot while working undercover as a stockbroker.

While it received mixed reviews from critics for its plot, script, and characters (currently holding a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 54%), it was good enough action-thriller fare to keep the crowds entertained, pulling more than $135 million from the worldwide box office on a $60 million budget.

4 The Sum Of All Fears (2002) – 60%

2002’s franchise reboot The Sum of All Fears stars Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan alongside Morgan Freeman as CIA director William Cabot. In the film, the two are pushed to the center of a multinational conflict as they try to stop an impending nuclear war.

The Sum of All Fears received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics and currently holds a rating of 60% on Rotten Tomatoes. Two of the things that polarized critics the most were the film’s heavy reliance on action and Affleck’s performance in the role of Jack Ryan. However, as the Rotten Tomatoes consensus states, reviewers could at least agree on it being a “slick and well-made thriller”. Needless to say, the film was also a box office success, making $193 million on a budget of $68 million.

3 Patriot Games (1992) – 73%

Of all the actors who have played Jack Ryan, Harrison Ford is the only one to play him twice. The first of these efforts, Patriot Games, was released in 1992. It follows a retired Jack Ryan who decides to take on one last mission after his wife and daughter are attacked by a terrorist vowing revenge.

While a two-hour-long adaptation of the nearly-800-page book would obviously rile some Clancy devotees, Clancy himself wasn’t too happy with the film either, publicly denouncing it prior to its release. Putting that aside, however, the film currently holds a 73% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with praise directed at its star and set pieces. It was also a success commercially, making more than $178 million worldwide on a $45 million budget.

2 Clear And Present Danger (1994) – 79%

After Patriot Games became a critical and commercial success, Paramount Pictures went through some tough negotiation with Clancy to get the rights to Clear and Present Danger. Both Ford and his co-star Anne Archer returned for the adaptation, which follows Ryan struggling to piece together a drug cartel take-down plot engineered by his government colleagues after they leave him unaware of their true intentions.

Clear and Present Danger was a box-office success, making more than $215 million worldwide on a budget of $62 million and becoming the highest-grossing film based on a Clancy novel. It received largely positive reviews from critics, and currently holds a 79% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with praise directed primarily at its plot and action — Richard Schickel of TIME magazine remarked: “in this movie… the lies ring true, and, at least for the length of its running time, absorb you in a conscientiously constructed fictional world.”

1 The Hunt For Red October (1990) – 89%

Tom Clancy’s debut novel, The Hunt for Red October, was published in 1984 and became an instant best-seller, earning numerous accolades and even an endorsement from then-president Ronald Reagan. A feature adaptation, released in 1990, starred Sean Connery as Marko Ramius, Commanding Officer of the Soviet sub Red October, and Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan, the CIA analyst whose job is to figure out why Ramius is taking Red October to North America.

The film currently sits at a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 89%, with the site’s critical consensus describing it as having “plenty of firepower to spare”. In addition to receiving mostly positive reviews from reviewers, the film even earned the quasi-approval of Clancy himself, who admitted: “they didn’t screw it up too much.” It was also a massive commercial success, making more than $200 million worldwide on a budget of $30 million, spending three consecutive weeks atop the United States box office, and setting the then-record for the highest weekend debut in the month of March.

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