About a year ago producer Joel Silver (‘The Matrix’,’V for Vendetta’) picked up the rights to John Carpenter’s ‘Escape from New York’ through Silver Pictures and Studio Canal. New Line had let the claim lapse instead of re-exploring the property, however, word has it that the franchise may rise once again but this time in the form of a prequel trilogy.
While the project has been in development for about a year, it sounds like we’ve still got some time to wait before the project even moves into the casting phase. When he was asked if they had finished the script, Silver answered, “No, no we’re not, no we’re not. I mean, it’s funny because we have a relationship with Studio Canal, which somehow ended up with the rights to that, and it has been floating around LA or at least in the development world for a long time.” So it looks like we won’t be seeing Snake for awhile.
When we do see Plissken again, though, we’ll be seeing a lot of him. Let’s just skip that whole two movie nonsense and go straight to a trilogy! How would they do a trilogy though? Well that’s a really good question and his answer is just as interesting.
“I always liked Kurt’s character, the Snake Plissken character, so I’ve always like that idea, but we kind of figured out a way to do almost a trilogy of that story. There was a videogame that came out a few years ago called Arkham City, which shows how when Gotham became this kind of walled prison and how it became a walled prison. And they never deal with that in the story of Escape from New York, so part of our idea was to kind of see how the city became this walled prison and how the Snake Plissken character was a hero and how he became not looked at as a hero. And then, in the middle of the story, would be the movie that we, you know, previously saw about the President’s daughter goes down, he has to go in and get her. And then, you know, they did a sequel, Escape from LA, but I would like to then kind of find a way to have New York go back to a place that we’d like to see what it is today.“
Seeing it as a trilogy where the classic movie is actually the second one in and building to something even greater? It sounds nice on paper but I’m wondering how a return to a proper city will work for Snake’s character in the third film in?
I am not one for reboots in general and this is a series that I do not really feel needs one. That being said his idea on it is original enough where it could provide us something quite entertaining and, more importantly, different from the source material to make it interesting. Sadly there is no hint that Kurt Russel (‘The Thing’,’Stargate’) would return to star.
What do you think of his ideas on how to bring back ‘Escape From New York’? Is it a solid idea or should they have just gone with a new name?
Source: Collider.
