I don’t know about everyone else, but I love this resurgence ’80s nostalgia. Just the other week I read story in EW about the curse of Fletch and how a reboot of the character made famous by Chevy Chase has been plagued with production problems. You have The Expendables coming out in August, which is Sylvester Stallone’s tribute to the ’80s action cinema. Darren Aronofsky is retooling RoboCop for a new audience (hopefully it still includes the fake commercials that were a part of Paul Verhoeven’s original).
Now there’s progress on a remake of John Carpenter’s sci-fi action film Escape from New York. New Line Cinema had hired Len Wiseman (coming off of Live Free or Die Hard) to direct and Gerard Butler was going to star. Wiseman was later replaced by Brett Ratner, who seems to be every studio’s go-to guy in case a project is floundering. Neither director seems fit to reboot the Snake Plissken character, and Gerard Butler isn’t enough of a bad ass to take on the role that Kurt Russell made famous. I can only hope that the role isn’t offered to Sam Worthington. That actor seems to be rumored to be part of every new project these days.
Vulture, who also broke the Hughes brothers/Akira story, has news that New Line is “quickly moving forward” with its remake plans thanks to a rewrite by Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps scribe Allan Loeb. According to the site, in the new draft, “Loeb 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.”
And with the current state of the economy, the studio found a much cheaper way to shoot the story; by changing destroyed Manhattan into a “geographically undesirable, but intact” privately run penal colony which was created “after the detonation of a crude radioactive dirty bomb on the outskirts of the city.” Even with the changes, it looks like Allan Loeb “gets it,” trying to remain faithful to the spirit of the original. Though it could have something to do with the agreement New Line signed with John Carpenter with regards to antihero, Snake Plissken. The character must be called “Snake”; he must wear an eye patch; and must always be a bad-ass. Because who wants an antihero who pussyfoots around?
