Did Jack Ryan predict Venezuela? The show's creator has answered the prophecy talk himself
In January 2026, a six-year-old scene from a Prime Video spy show started racking up millions of views on X. The clip: John Krasinski's Jack Ryan, standing in front of a room, explaining exactly why Venezuela matters.
Carlton Cuse, who co-created the series with Graham Roland and ran its first two seasons, gave Deadline a direct answer about the resemblance. He called it plausibility rather than prophecy — the result of building a thriller on real geopolitics, not of guessing an outcome.
"The goal of that season wasn't prophecy — it was plausibility," Cuse told Deadline in January 2026.
What the show actually did
Jack Ryan's second season, released in November 2019, centers on Venezuela. In the viral lecture scene, Ryan describes the country as arguably the greatest concentration of oil and minerals on the planet, sitting alongside one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern history.
The fictional president is Nicolás Reyes, played by Jordi Mollà — a name one syllable away from the real one, written while Nicolás Maduro's contested 2018 election was fresh. Reyes runs a secret jungle prison camp and kills anyone who threatens the regime.
Where fiction and reality diverge
The season ends with Reyes exposed and out of power. But the mechanism isn't the same one that played out in January 2026:
- In the show — Ryan and the CIA station chief fly a helicopter into the presidential palace, confront Reyes with evidence of the prison camp, and the opposition wins the election.
- In reality — a U.S. military operation resulted in Maduro's capture and removal, with Maduro and Cilia Flores facing narco-terrorism charges in New York and Delcy Rodríguez stepping in as interim head of state.
One is an election plot. The other is a special forces operation. The overlap is the setting, the oil, and the outcome for the man in charge.
Why Cuse picked Venezuela in the first place
He told Deadline the season was conceived more than seven years before the events, and that he and Roland weren't making a statement — they were writing a character thriller rooted in a country with long-standing strategic relevance, where economic reality and geopolitical interest have been in tension for decades. The job, as he framed it, was making the situation feel credible on screen.
The clip wasn't the only old thing resurfacing. A 2007 Carlos Latuff cartoon showing Uncle Sam with a regime-change to-do list also went back into circulation, read as vindication by people on both sides of the argument.
Has Jack Ryan "predicted" anything else?
The franchise has a long history of this. Tom Clancy's 1994 novel Debt of Honor ends with a jet flown into the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress. Clancy spent the rest of his life fielding questions about it after September 2001, and gave a version of the same answer Cuse gave: research plus plausibility, not foresight.
A Jack Ryan feature film was in production as of early 2026. Whatever country it picks, expect the clip to resurface in about seven years.