“Escape from New York,” John Carpenter’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece, has constantly been threatened with a remake. Everyone from now-disgraced action auteur Brett Ratner to “The Invisible Man” mastermind Leigh Whannell has taken a crack at the material over the years. But it seems like a remake is closer than its ever been, thanks to a new version from the filmmaking team Radio Silence (Tyler Gillett, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Chad Villella).
Villella recently told Entertainment Weekly that the project is in “very, very early stages” and get this – it’s not a remake but a continuation of the original.
The “Escape from New York” from 1981 followed criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), who is recruited to save the President (Donald Pleasence) after his plane goes down in New York City, now a walled-off penal colony full of the worst of the worst. Defined largely by its believably decayed production design (assisted by a young James Cameron), a supporting cast full of colorful character actors (including Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Tom Atkins, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau) and Carpenter’s evocative electronic score, it has endured as a true cult classic and one of Carpenter’s very best films.
It was followed by a sequel, 1997’s “Escape from L.A.,” which reunited Russell and Carpenter but felt somewhat watered-down. (Plans for a third film “Escape from Earth,” were shuttered, but some elements made it into Carpenter’s “Ghosts of Mars.”)
Since at least 2007, attempts at a remake have been made, with Gerard Butler at one point attached as Snake and filmmakers like Len Wiseman, Breck Eisner, Robert Rodriguez and Whannell all circling the project at one point or another. Now Radio Silence have boarded are are assuring fans that it won’t be a remake after all.
“We’re very excited to be working with 20th Century on that,” Villella told EW, as he previewed Radio Silence’s upcoming “Scream VI.” “We’re developing our take, and hopefully, it will be going to script sometime in the New Year, and just really starting to lay the groundwork for that. But very early stages.”
“Not a remake,” added Gillett. “That’s one of those properties that you can’t [remake], it’s sort of untouchable to us, and lives in its own stratosphere in terms of how important it is to us, and how much we love it. So it’ll be not unlike ‘Scream,’ I think, a nod to, and a continuation of, what we love about those characters and that world.”
While rumors have circulated for years that Wyatt Russell would be part of the remake, could he actually be part of this sequel? Could Snake have a son?
