Earlier this week, Devin wrote about Gerard Butler stepping into the shoes of Snake Plisskin, to which the general reply was: OK, not the worst thing ever…who’s directing? We still don’t have a director for Ken Nolan’s script, but we do know that the film has landed at New Line. Several studios stuck hands out to grab the picture, which will be produced in cooperation with European rights holder StudioCanal, and the Hobbit House came up tops.
And just in case anyone has doubts about what Carpenter intended the first time, the Reporter threw in a nice quote from the old guy: "I just thought it was a futuristic action movie when I did it the first
time. It was a script that I used to fulfill a contract. And Kurt was
primarily known as a child actor, and I thought it might be interesting
to see him in a role like that."
I’m with Devin in thinking that, as is, this isn’t the right time to remake Escape. Major changes will have to be made to work the story into something that makes sense today. Though instead of Dev’s idea of a terrorist attack that makes NYC into something resembling what we saw in the original, I like the notion of Snake having to fight his way through all the rich people that have remade Manhattan. I’m envisioning a hardened crew of young, wealthy thrill-seekers who have already killed off all the homeless; now they’ve got to spend the film trying to serve papers to Plisskin.
I’d originally been thinking, too, that the remake might be bloated with a lot of first-act exposition explaining at least one reason why, in this day and age, it would still be a good idea to rescue the President in the first place. But then I realized what Ken Nolan no doubt already has: a few subliminal frames of Dick Cheney will totally do the trick.