Tom Clancy has produced some of the most incredible novels over the years. With a focus on espionage and military-science, Tom Clancy‘s stories have become fodder for some terrific thriller movies over the years, with the most popular being the Jack Ryan series.
Over the years, his works have sold over 100 million copies, and have been adapted into feature films, TV movies, and even video games. Though he passed away in 2013, his work lives on through the legacy of action movies his tales produced.
But one of his most famous adaptations was something of a sore point for the author, and he ended up hating it so much that he requested his name be removed from the final product altogether. The movie in question? 1992’s Patriot Games.
“I sold them this product in good faith. This request is not being done on the spur of the moment. I told them this was a possibility in late August – the product they are turning out is a disaster,” said Clancy [via The Baltimore Sun].
“The movie simply is not based on my book. To the best of my knowledge, there’s not a single scene in the movie that tracks with a scene in the book.”
Make no mistake, Patriot Games was a big deal at the time of release. It’s also a Harrison Ford movie, and boasts a star-studded cast also consisting of Sean Bean, Samuel L. Jackson, and James Earl Jones.
It seems like Clancy himself may be one of the few who don’t like the movie all that much, since it spent two weeks in the number one spot at the US box office, and ended up pulling in $178 million worldwide. It was positively reviewed at the time, and even resulted in a sequel, Clear and Present Danger.
So what exactly got Clancy so wound up about the whole thing? Well, a number of factors most likely, but he was particularly vocal about a significant amount of inaccuracies, most notably to do with continuity and location errors.
But the experience wasn’t quite enough to deter him from allowing his work to be adapted elsewhere. There was even a Clancy movie made as recently as 2021, Without Remorse, which starred Michael B. Jordan.