Escape From New York is being remade by the Ready Or Not and Scream guys
Directing team Radio Silence will be tackling John Carpenter and Kurt Russell's 1981 dystopian classic
Ensuring, if nothing else, that John Carpenter will likely be set for weed and video game money for at least another year, Deadline is reporting that a remake of Escape From New York is currently in the works. Interestingly, the film is being handled by Radio Silence—a.k.a. directing/producing trio Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, and Chad Villella, whose previous credits include the most recent Scream movie and the very good Ready Or Not. Which is to say that there’s an Escape From New York remake that won’t be directed by John Carpenter, and presumably won’t star Kurt Russell, and yet we find ourselves…loosely optimistic?
The premise of the original Escape, which Carpenter co-wrote and directed in 1981, isn’t especially complicated: In a future built from every suburban mom’s latent terror of The Big City, Manhattan has been transformed into a prison island filled with the kinds of cool crime bosses who put chandeliers in their cars. When President Donald Pleasance is kidnapped by said criminals, anti-hero Snake Plissken is sent in to get him out, with the promise of a presidential pardon and a bunch of lil’ bombs injected into his neck to get him to do the gig.
There’s a number of issues standing between an Escape remake and reality, of course, as there have been for years now—most notably the question of who the hell you get to try to play an updated version of Snake. (There’s also the whole issue of whether the film’s version of New-York-As-Hellscape makes sense in 2022, although we know some right-wing Twitter accounts that would probably love to see it.) Still, the Radio Silence guys have a strong track record running at the moment: Their Scream movie did pretty well at the box office, with a sequel recently completed, and Ready Or Not was one of the most enjoyable horror-comedies in recent memories. None of that guarantees they’ll be able to match Carpenter at his own game, of course, but we’re honestly excited to see them try to pull it off.