After yesterday’s birthday celebration, actor Kurt Russell has awakened to some truly horrible news. We imagined a potential reboot to his John Carpenter-directed Escape From New York was more or less dead when New Line and Warner Bros. abandoned the project after attaching The Crazies director Breck Eisner. But sadly, new, potentially more harmful plans have sprouted.
According to Deadline, The Matrix and Sherlock Holmes producer Joel Silver‘s has grabbed the rights and is partnering with Studio Canal to not only create one film, but rather an entire franchise trilogy surrounding the 1981 original. Following Russell as convict Snake Plissken, the original told the story of Manhattan becoming a post-apocalyptic maximum security prison, where he much rescue the president that has been taken hostage.
This new take wants to get into the origins of Plissken, but no word yet on who will play him (the names of Gerard Butler, Jeremy Renner and Tom Hardy were all bandied about in the previous iteration). With a writer search underway, Silver is hoping to craft this into a trilogy, along the lines of the succesful Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes reboot. I’m one to give a project the benefit of the doubt, but this direction simply seems wrong for the character of Plissken. I can’t imagine fans of the original want to see where this action icon began, so let’s cross our fingers that this one stalls like the other iteration.
Do you want to see a reboot of the Carpenter classic?