There are certain movies that are able to avoid easy remakes by nostalgia-hungry studios because the roles at the heart of the stories are simply impossible for a younger actor to assume. We’ll likely never see a rebooted Raiders of the Lost Ark or Die Hard because no actor in his or her right mind wants to play Indiana Jones or John McClane and draw automatic unfavorable comparisons to Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis or other icons of the silver screen.
While he might not be as much of a household name as Indiana, Kurt Russell’s anti-hero Snake Plissken certainly belongs on that short list of characters you simply don’t touch … ever. And yet, Deadline says that producer Joel Silver and Studio Canal will remake John Carpenter’s 1981 classic Escape from New York, meaning some poor bastard is going to have to try and fill Russell’s shoes. Good luck with that.
The site says that Silver is planning “an entirely new take on the material,” which was originally about a convict hired to rescue the kidnapped President of the United States from the island of Manhattan which, in the distant future, exists as a walled-off prison for our nation’s worst criminals. Deadline also says that the reboot will attempt to set up a trilogy, and points to the success of Rise of the Planet of the Apes as a blueprint that the new Plissken movies could follow.
They said similar things when this idea was batted around a few years back, when Gerard Butler and Jeremy Renner were rumored for the role of Plissken. As it is, Escape from New York is one of those properties that Hollywood should realize worked once and won't work again (see the dreadful Escape from L.A. sequel, which failed to recapture the original’s magic.). But we’ll wait to see who they hire to direct the remake, and who they tap to reinvent Plissken for a new generation. Just to make you more upset, watch the trailer for the original, then brace for the inevitable news that a Big Trouble in Little China reboot is right around the corner as well.
