John Carpenter: No one involved with Dwayne Johnson's Big Trouble In Little China remake "gives a shit about me and my movie"

Amid the thousand or so projects he’s working on at any given moment—which currently include Jungle Cruise, Fast And Furious spin-off Hobbs And Shaw, Black Adam, a Jumanji sequel, and his controversial decision to play black folk hero John Henry for Netflix—you’d be forgiven for letting a few of Dwayne Johnson’s various movie ideas slip through the cracks. Like, say, his decision—announced back in 2015—to do a remake/sequel/something to John Carpenter’s cult classic Big Trouble In Little China.

Among the list of those who haven’t forgotten about Johnson’s intentions to step into the fabled big rig of ol’ Jack Burton, though, is John Carpenter, who had some typically harsh words for the reboot project when CinemaBlend asked him about it this week. “They want a movie with Dwayne Johnson,” Carpenter told interviewers, taking a break from his busy “sitting around and playing video games, because fuck you, he’s John Carpenter” schedule to throw a little shade the movie’s away. “That’s what they want. So they just picked that title. They don’t give a shit about me and my movie.”

To be fair, few directors have been as poorly done over by the Hollywood remake machine as Carpenter, who’s had any number of his beloved genre flicks—Halloween, The Thing, Assault On Precinct 13, The Fog—tossed into the grinder, sanding down his gritty, individualized visions into generic would-be blockbuster pap sailing along on little more than name recognition. And even Carpenter isn’t sure why you’d want to remake/reboot/continue Big Trouble, especially since it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire back in 1986: “That movie wasn’t a success.”

If there’s a silver lining here, it’s the possibility that not even The Rock remembers he was planning on making this movie; dude makes a lot of stuff, and not even he can probably be relied upon to remember which ones he’s got in development right now.