The team behind the latest attempt to revive the John Carpenter classic Escape From New York have said a remake is out of the question.
John Carpenter’s Escape From New York is an early 1980s dystopian classic, and like most of Carpenter’s films from that era, is undergoing the remake treatment… or at lest we thought it was.
Halloween, The Fog, Assault On Precinct 13 and The Thing have already been remade at various points in the last couple of decades whilst Christine, Big Trouble in Little China and Escape From New York have all been in the remake pipeline at some point.
If and when Escape From New York does finally emerge once more into the world however, it won’t be a remake, not if the current creative team behind the project have anything to do with it. The directing duo of Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin are developing the project along with Chad Villella. The team are behind 2019’s excellent Ready Or Not and the 2022 Scream sequel, and they have pointed to the latter’s success as a legacy sequel as a means to illustrate what they are looking to do with their take on Escape From New York.
In the 1981 original, Kurt Russell memorably played Snake Plissken, an elite special forces operative in a dystopian future where the island of New York has become an impenetrable prison.
Speaking to EW, the trio have confirmed that their take on the film would not be a remake because the reverence they hold for the original is too great. Instead, they would look to tell a story within that universe rather than try to outdo it. “Not a remake”, they insisted. “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.”
The trio certainly bought some fresh ideas to a waning franchise with 2022’s Scream so if we’re getting more Escape From New York, this doesn’t feel like the worst approach, especially if Kurt Russell could be persuaded to come back. It’s in the very early stages though, with the trio adding:
“We’re developing our take, and hopefully, it will be going to script sometime in the New Year”, they added, with the project in the early stages of work at the moment.
It could yet be that this one goes nowhere, as several other filmmakers including Leigh Whannell and Robert Rodriguez have tried and failed to get an Escape From New York movie up and running. It’ll likely be some time before we hear whether this one has legs but if it does, expect a sequel in the style of 1996’s Escape From L.A. rather than a remake. Bring it to the UK, we say, right near the Film Stories offices. Escape From The West Midlands, anyone?
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