DC's 'Titans' star Alan Ritchson takes over from Tom Cruise as the new Jack Reacher

Alan Ritchson, star of DC's Titans series, has been cast as the new Jack Reacher, in Amazon's planned serialised reboot of Lee Child's best-selling novel series.

Ritchson takes over the role from Tom Cruise, who played the former military policeman turned wandering crime disrupter in two movies, 2012's Jack Reacher and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back in 2016.

Read more: Tom Cruise pulls of epic Mission: Impossible 7 stunt

37-year-old Ritchson plays Hank Hall, aka Hawk, in DC's TV series Titans, and also starred in the college football comedy Blue Mountain State.

On the big screen, he starred in Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle reboot movies.

The Amazon series will take on first of the Jack Reacher novels, The Killing Floor, first published by Child in 1997 – the first Cruise movie took on One Shot, published in 2005.

The pair of movies did only moderate business for a Cruise-helmed project, making just $400 million combined.

And Child has since been vocal with his views on Cruise playing the role, due to his less than hulking stature.

In the books, Reacher is a six-foot five giant, weighing 250 lbs, nearly a foot taller than Cruise, while Child describes his hands as being 'like Thanksgiving turkeys'.

Read more: Tom Cruise could earn £50m from space movie

Ritchson, meanwhile, is a more sturdy six-foot two.

Child told The Guardian: “I've got tens of thousands of letters saying they didn't like Cruise because he's too small, basically. Part of Reacher's appeal is that he's very intimidating.

“Even without doing anything, if he walks into a room, people are a little bit uneasy. It was felt that, for all his virtues, Cruise didn't represent that. So the readers were cross from the beginning.”

Dwayne Johnson revealed in 2017 that he had gone for the role, but had lost it to Cruise.