Highlights
- Alan Ritchson revealed a Reacher season adapting Die Trying was scrapped after Trump’s 2024 re-election.
- The actor didn’t name Trump directly but said the approved season died once “someone got re-elected.”
- Season five is confirmed to adapt Make Me instead, while Die Trying remains shelved indefinitely.
Alan Ritchson just proved you don’t need to name the president to land a punch on him.
The Reacher star was on Threads Friday when a fan groused that Prime Video keeps dodging “the book where he kills his way through a white supremacist militia camp” — Lee Child‘s 1998 novel Die Trying. Turns out the dodge wasn’t a creative call. It was political.
“My favorite book,” Ritchson replied. “Fun fact: I had it approved until someone got re-elected.”
No name. No hashtag. Didn’t need one. Trump won reelection in November 2024, and a season built around Reacher dismantling a homegrown militia quietly vanished from the schedule right around then. The internet did the math in seconds.
This isn’t a one-off grievance. Ritchson has sparred publicly with everyone from Ron DeSantis to Matt Gaetz, and insiders say Sony leaned on him to cool it after he suggested Trump was sitting on the Epstein files.
He didn’t cool it. On the Happy Sad Confused podcast in July, he laid out exactly what he thought Trump deserved: “Go to jail.”
Season five of Reacher already has its early renewal locked, adapting Child’s twelfth novel, Make Me. Die Trying stays on the shelf, its militia showdown apparently sitting a little too close to the current political nerve for a streamer’s comfort.
Ritchson never said which season was supposed to carry the story, and Prime Video hasn’t commented. But he didn’t need a press release to make his point: sometimes the algorithm isn’t the only thing that decides what gets canceled.
