I had hoped that, after many false starts, the ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK remake was dead. After tentative involvement, both Brett Ratner and Len Wiseman had dropped out, as had Gerard Butler (who is cool in his own right, but he’s not Snake Plisskin), and the project seemed rudderless. The last thing we heard about it was that Josh Brolin was potentially in the running to strap on the eye-patch. Not a bad choice, actually, but I’d rather the film just not happen.
According to The Vulture (part of New York Magazine), the remake is very much alive over at New Line – in fact it’s “quickly moving forward”. This is because a new draft of the screenplay, by WALL STREET 2 writer Allan Loeb of all people, is apparently a home run.
While we can imagine all sorts of horrible things being done to our beloved Snake, there may be some hope for the updated character yet. It turns out that, in order to obtain the rights, New Line had to sign a contract with John Carpenter stipulating 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.'”
There shall be some changes, however. Via the site: In Escape 2.0, the Big Apple 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… This means New York will still be recognizable to audiences, à la I Am Legend, rather than an entirely new Armageddon Island.
In addition, Snake won’t be rescuing the President, but rather a female senator. Something tells me she won’t look like Hillary Clinton…
To read more about this project, head on over HERE. And chime in below with your thoughts on seeing a new Snake Plisskin adventure: Who would you cast? Who should direct? And most importantly, who could possibly replace Adrienne Barbeau’s knockers?!
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