We watched Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (2018-2019). Tom Clancy is credited as Executive Producer… but he died in 2013. How’s that work?
Executive producers don’t necessarily do anything directly in the production. Some will be hip deep in it…some might just have been important in the initial pitch or something else pretty peripheral. It could be as simple as it having been specified that he got an executive producer credit in the contract to buy the rights to his intellectual property.
Im guessing his estate own the name. He is amazing. He keeps writing books from beyond the grave too.
Movies often take a long time to go from script to release, so he might well have been involved in the early stages of whatever fairly minor roles exec producers do, like getting a screenwriter to sign up or get some funding in place or… well, I don’t think it’s really clear what executive producers do, but it’s certainly possible for him to have done some of it before he died.
I’ll bet you Stan Lee will still be credited on Marvel films released a decade from now.
Probably this.
Probably this too.
It went into development two years after Clancy died.
But the original TV rights were probably optioned decades ago. Part of that license probably stipulates an executive producer credit.
And the executive producer check being made out to “The estate of …”