Are you attempting to get a big budget franchise screenplay into fighting shape with a rewrite or two?  Odds are, you’ll try get David Koepp to take a crack at it.  Koepp is one of the most high profile screenwriters around, famous for smoothing out the rough edges on potential blockbuster scripts.  He’s credited with contributions to Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Angels & Demons, War of the Worlds, Mission: Impossible, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  Now, Paramount has hired him to sort out their lingering script issues with the as-yet untitled Jack Ryan reboot starring Chris Pine.

The studio recently rescheduled the film, swapping places with Pine’s current science fiction franchise.  The original plan involved filming the Jack Ryan adventure before Pine returned to the role of Captain James Tiberius Kirk in the Star Trek sequel, which will shoot in this fall, likely under the direction of JJ Abrams.  Though that plan could still have worked out, dissatisfaction with the screenplay led Paramount to delay the reboot in order to beef up the story.

Deadline reports that David Koepp will get to work rebooting Ryan once he has completed work on his latest directorial feature, Premium Rush, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Shannon.  Their article also confirms that Jack Bender, who directed 34 episodes of ABC’s Lost, is still on board to direct the origin story, which is tentatively scheduled to being production in January.

Koepp is the latest in a string of writers to tackle the material, starting with Hossein Amini.  After Amini, Adam Cozad was tasked with rejiggering his spec script Dubai into a Ryan-centric espionage tale.  Anthony Peckham took a crack at it, then Cozad was brought back.  Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, who wrote Clear and Present Danger and made an uncredited contribution to Patriot Games, was briefly on board, but he quickly exited the project.

Rather than simply rushing the film to meet a release date, the emphasis is being placed firmly on kickstarting a new franchise.  It won’t be the first time Paramount has dusted off the heroic CIA analyst first played by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt For Red October; in 2002, Ben Affleck played a younger version of Ryan in The Sum of All Fears.  Neither actor is as associated with the role as Harrison Ford, who played him twice in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.