Producer Joel Silver and Studio Canal will collaborate on a remake of John Carpenter’s post-apocalyptic classic Escape From New York, necessitated by the fact that no one has done that yet. The most recent attempt was abandoned in 2011, its prospects withering as New Line failed to incite interest in actors like Gerard Butler, Jeremy Renner, and Tom Hardy in taking on the role of Snake Plissken—a usurping similarly necessitated by the fact that Kurt Russell is no longer visible to the human eye, having years ago evolved into a being of pure shadow. That, and Russell is, regrettably, too old to star in what Silver is pitching as an all-new trilogy, one that kicks off a la Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes with “an origin story” that presumably begins with Dutch settlers colonizing New York, then some stuff about the Astor family and CBGB’s, and maybe around the third movie, Snake finally lands in Bloomberg Maximum-Security Prison for overzealous tweeting or something.
Deadline suggests that Butler, Renner, and Hardy could all still ostensibly be considered to play Snake, then it casually throws Liam Neeson into the mix because of his involvement in two other Silver/Studio Canal films (and because you can’t have a movie about an angry running man without considering Liam Neeson). There’s no confirmation yet that Carpenter’s contractual stipulation that any new Snake “must wear an eye-patch and always be a badass” stands, though obviously, “a bad-ass in an eye-patch” is still basically the essence of this whole idea.