John Krasinski Just Conquered Netflix’s Wednesday
John Krasinski's Jack Ryan season 3 debuted in the number one spot on Neilson's Streaming Originals chart, dethroning Wednesday.
Wednesday and the rest of the students at Nevermore Academy were finally vanquished from the top of Neilson’s streaming chart by trained CIA operative Jack Ryan. TVLine reports that John Krasinski’s Jack Ryan has finally dethroned Wednesday from the number one spot of Neilson’s streaming chart after the Netflix original was on top for four straight weeks. The numbers are from the week ending December 19th and catalog only streaming originals.
The Amazon original was immediately controversial for casting John Krasinksi as Jack Ryan in the latest adaption of the Tom Clancy novels. Famous for his role as Jim Halper in The Office, it was hard for the public to imagine him as an action star. Going into the third season of the hit series, the only question audiences have about Krasinski is if he’ll be part of the upcoming spin-off.
In terms of overall numbers, John Krasinski’s Jack Ryan had 1.834 billion minutes watched, beating Wednesday’s 1.80 billion minutes. Of course, all 24 episodes of Jack Ryan were counted against only the eight of Wednesday, but a win’s a win. According to Neilson, the audience for Jack Ryan is over half male and two-thirds were aged 55 and above.
Netflix scored another win though, with The Recruit coming in at number three with 1.7 billion minutes, which like the John Krasinski series involves the CIA, just a much lower level than Jack Ryan. The Recruit follows a rookie lawyer at the CIA that slowly gets wrapped up in international espionage. While similar to the first season of the Amazon series, which also saw desk worker Jack Ryan pulled into high-stakes operations.
The recently aired third season is not the last, as Amazon said the show would be back for a fourth and final season, hopefully airing later in 2023. At the same time, Amazon also announced Rainbow Six, starring Michael Pena, based off of the Tom Clancy book of the same name. John Krasinski may be involved in the spin-off, even though in the novel Jack Ryan has no connection to the international special-ops team.
John Krasinski’s Jack Ryan isn’t the only recurring character that may be in the spin-off, as Michael B. Jordan will be reprising his role as John Clark, the special forces operative he played in Without Remorse. In the novel, Clark is the commanding officer to Pena’s Ding Chavez, who also happens to be his son-in-law in the expansive Clancyverse. Clark and Ryan have frequent interactions in the many, many novels of Tom Clancy as they each rise up the ranks of their respective special operations departments.
While Amazon’s other original series this year, Rings of Power, has been the service’s biggest hit, John Krasinski’s Jack Ryan is still putting up phenomenal numbers for the company. After multiple attempts to launch a successful franchise off of Tom Clancy’s characters, it took the fifth actor to play Ryan to make it happen, following Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine. Season 3 of Jack Ryan is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
