How to watch Jack Reacher: Best order for the TV show and movies

With Amazon Prime’s new show Reacher re-casting the main character of Jack Reacher, things just got a little more complicated for those looking to move from Lee Child’s excellent books to see some on-screen version of his intricate plots.

Here, we’ll guide you through the key details you need to know about how to watch the show, as well as how they interact with the Tom Cruise movies, and whether there are more seasons coming down the pike.

How to watch the Jack Reacher TV show

The new TV show released on Amazon Prime Video in February 2022, so you can watch it right now.

This means that regardless of where you’re based, you can just take out an Amazon Prime Video membership or trial to get access to Prime Video and be able to watch the season at no extra cost.

If you prefer to buy it physically, Reacher’s first season is coming out on 4K Blu-ray on 13 December 2022, so you can get it in top-quality once that’s happened.

Best order to watch Jack Reacher in

The big thing to understand is that the Amazon show is a complete reboot of the character – there is no continuity between the two Tom Cruise movies, Jack Reacher and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, the last of which was released in 2016.

Tom Cruise’s casting was famously controversial since he’s a notably short man despite his significant action movie experience, and Jack Reacher is described in the books as practically giant, as well as being blond.

This means that if you’re looking to watch all of the adaptations out there right now you can basically do it in two chunks:

First, check out the two Tom Cruise movies, starting with Jack Reacher and then moving on to Never Go Back.

Then, you can move over to the new Amazon series, which has Alan Ritchson in the title role.

What is Jack Reacher based on?

Lee Child has written a huge swathe of Jack Reacher novels, each broadly revolving around his hero arriving in a town or city, finding out something very wrong is happening, and trying to put it right through often brutal means.

The two Tom Cruise movies were based on the mid-series books One Shot and Never Go Back, although they played with the plots a little.

The new TV series on Amazon’s first season is based on Killing Floor, the first Reacher novel, and takes a slower pace to go through the book in eight episodes with a bit more time spent on certain sequences.

Jack Reacher book order

If you’ve sampled the show or movies and fancy actually reading some of Lee Child’s superb thrillers, you’ll be making a great call. We’ve read every single one, and it’s one of the most reliably entertaining series in literature, for our money.

Because of timeline jumps and flashback novels there are a few orders you could read the Reacher novels in, but to get a sense of how the character formed and evolved over time we think there’s nothing wrong with going through them in publication order, which you can find below.

1. Killing Floor
2. Die Trying
3. Tripwire
4. The Visitor
5. Echo Burning
6. Without Fail
7. Persuader
8. The Enemy
9. One Shot
10. The Hard Way
11. Bad Luck and Trouble
12. Nothing to Lose
13. Gone Tomorrow
14. 61 Hours
15. Worth Dying For
16. The Affair
17. A Wanted Man
18. Never Go Back
19. Personal
20. Make Me
21. Night Schol
22. The Midnight Line
23. Past Tense
24. Blue Moon
25. The Sentinel
26. Better Off Dead
27. No Plan B

If you prefer, you can catch up on the easily using Amazon’s Audible platform for audiobooks, which has a handy free trial that you can access here in the US or here in the UK.