Escape from NY remake is moving forward

Posted on February 11, 2010
Filed Under Actors, Directors, Remake

Let us continue down remake lane, shall we? I’m actually almost too young to have any emotional ties to “The Escape from New York.” I remember seeing it the first time when I was like ten years old but I must admit it didn’t do anything for me. Later on, when I was in my teens I discovered it again and this time Kurt Russell’s character Snake Plissken just blew me away. He’s is undoubtedly one of the coolest, most bad-ass characters ever!

Vulture posts that New Line Cinema is quickly moving forward with plans to remake John Carpenter’s 1981 action classic “Escape From New York“, thanks to the creative writing of Allan Loeb. He nailed the humor in Plissken without slipping into camp, and he changed Snake’s rescue-mission target from a president to a female senator, thereby upping the banter quotient. But just as big a factor was economic: They found a much cheaper way to turn Manhattan into a giant prison.

In the original, set at the end of World War III, New York City was a husk of itself after being turned into a giant prison, but that kind of destruction gets pricey.  So in the remake, the Big Apple that the as-yet-uncast Snake Plissken is dropped into, will be geographically undesirable, but intact. This Manhattan was evacuated and turned into a privately run penal colony after the detonation of a crude radioactive dirty bomb on the outskirts of the city. “It is not a disaster movie,” says a source close to the project. “It is an exposé of an ecosystem, if you put a huge wall around Manhattan and then dropped in the most f****d-up, dangerous criminals on Earth.” This means New York will still be recognizable to audiences, à la “I Am Legend“, rather than an entirely new Armageddon Island.

Much like in the original movie, the authorities have set up shop in the Statue of Liberty (though this time it’s not the police, it’s a private, KBR-like security company), and now new prisoners are being processed through Ellis Island. And more importantly, good ol’ Snake remains largely the same. Legally, he has to be. We learned that in order to land the rights, New Line had to sign a contract with John Carpenter stipulating, among other things, that Plissken “must be called ‘Snake’“; “must wear an eye patch”; and that he would — and we’re not making this up — “always be a bad-ass.”

Well of course he must! You go Carpenter!

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