Paramount Pictures

Right below "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan" on the IMDb rankings is "The Hunt for Red October," the film that started it all. Released in theaters six years after Clancy's original 1984 novel was published, the film quickly eclipsed the book in terms of widespread cultural recognition, thanks in large part to Sean Connery's outsized performance as Russian submarine captain Marko Ramius. The film holds a 7.5 score on IMDb across 220,000 ratings, while its Metacritic score — composed entirely of critical reviews — is much lower at 58/100.

Following "Red October" on the IMDb rankings are the two Harrison Ford Jack Ryan movies, which directly followed Baldwin's one-and-done turn as the character. 1994's "Clear and Present Danger" holds a 6.9 score across 111,000 ratings, just barely edging out its 1992 predecessor, "Patriot Games," which holds a 6.8.

These three also have the highest Metacritic scores of all the Jack Ryan films, but the order is a bit different. "Clear and Present Danger" has the highest score there with a 72, "Patriot Games" is second with a 64, and "Hunt for Red October" drops from first to third with its 58. Clearly, opinions on these films aren't monolithic, but most viewers would agree that they all outshine the movies that came later.

Paramount Pictures

After Harrison Ford's two-film stint as Jack Ryan, the franchise tried to keep things going in the 21st century with a new, younger star in the role. The part ultimately went to Ben Affleck, who was a major A-lister in Hollywood in 2002 when "The Sum of All Fears" premiered. The studio paired Affleck with Morgan Freeman for a pretty big-name duo helming the marquee, but the film didn't achieve the same level of acclaim as its predecessors.

The movie's IMDb user rating right now sits at a 6.5 — not that much worse than the 6.8 of "Patriot Games." However, the film also has a much lower Metacritic score at 45 and some Rotten Tomatoes numbers to match — a 59% approval rating from the critics and a 49% approval rating from regular moviegoers. Despite critiques, the film did well at the box office, grossing nearly $200 million worldwide on a budget of just $68 million. Even still, a sequel with Affleck never came about, and it was more than a decade before anyone would try to make another Jack Ryan movie.

That successor finally arrived in 2014, this time with Chris Pine in the leading role. "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" took a different approach by creating a new story instead of adapting an existing Tom Clancy novel. The result? The lowest IMDb score in the franchise with a 6.2. Given the reactions to the last two Jack Ryan movies, perhaps Amazon was wise to greenlight a TV series instead.