In the last few years, there haven’t been many action shows reach the same height as Alan Ritchson’s Reacher, but the show that inspired it is finally set to make a comeback. Before starring in the titular role in the Prime Video action series, Alan Ritchson was around as one of the more recognizable stars in Hollywood thanks to his role as Thad in Blue Mountain State, but he had never really broken out. Reacher has helped him become one of the biggest action heroes in Hollywood, now featuring in huge hits like War Machine while also teaming up with Guy Ritchie for movies like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. As Ritchson’s stardom has grown, so too has Reacher’s audience, and each new season continues to impress with dazzling viewership returns.
Reacher is based on the series of novels by Lee Child, and the stories were first adapted to the screen years ago with Tom Cruise in the leading role, but most fans agree that Ritchson is much more suited to the stature of how the character is described in the books. Child has admitted several inspirations behind Reacher over the years, one of them being The Day of the Jackal, the iconic spy thriller book that was first released in 1971 courtesy of author Frederick Forsyth. The novel was adapted into a feature film in 1973 before Peacock turned it into a TV show in 2025 starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch. Peacock renewed The Day of the Jackal for Season 2, but while it was once thought that the show would return before the end of this year, it’s now been confirmed that it will not return to streaming until 2027.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
01
How does a room know you’ve walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.
05
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
What Is ‘The Day of the Jackal’ About?
The Day of the Jackal was written and showrun by Ronan Bennett, who also penned the first season of MobLand on Paramount Plus. However, Bennett stepped back from his writing and showrunning duties in Season 2, leaving David Harrower to take over the position. The official synopsis for The Day of the Jackal Season 1, which earned scores of 85% from critics and 77% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, reads as follows:
“An elite sniper, a master of disguise and a highly trained killer, the Jackal is an assassin, coldly carrying out hits for a fee. Following an attack on a high-profile and notorious politician, he’s offered his riskiest job yet, one that could pay him enough to leave this life for good. But his work has attracted the attention of Bianca, a tenacious British intelligence officer, whose world-class expertise in firearms makes her the ideal candidate to hunt him down. What follows is a thrilling cat-and-mouse chase across Europe, as the Jackal works to carry out his new mission, while being pursued by Bianca. However, as the hunt continues and more casualties are caught in their crossfire, it becomes clear that there may be other forces pulling the strings. As both Bianca and the Jackal’s personal lives clash with their work, they risk everything, pushing themselves to their limits with disastrous consequences.”
Check out the first season of The Day of the Jackal on Peacock and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of the show.
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