Reading through interviews with horror legend-turned-synthwave star John Carpenter, one thing is glaringly obvious: Carpenter would rather be just about anywhere than wherever he is at that particular moment. Even trying to ply the 68-year-old with two of his favorite subjects, basketball and video games, can be a tricky proposition. (It worked pretty well for The A.V. Club’s Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, though.) So when Carpenter does give up some new information in an interview, like the one last month where he called Rob Zombie a “piece of shit” for claiming that Carpenter wasn’t supportive of his 2007 Halloween remake, it’s kind of an event.
Now Carpenter’s making headlines with another cranky interview, only this time he’s unhappy about a remake of one of his movies that hasn’t even been made yet. Horror news site Bloody-Disgusting cites an interview Carpenter recently gave to Screen Rant, in which the director says that the planned remake “might be crazy, [or] it might be great! I don’t know. Nobody’s told me anything. No one tells me anything.” (He apparently laughed after saying this, so don’t get too upset on his behalf.) This is basically what Carptenter said when asked about the remake last summer, when he told The Wall Street Journal that he was “ambivalent about a remake” and hadn’t talked to anyone involved with the project. So either the project is moving forward without Carpenter, or we’re all getting worked up about a remake that has stalled in pre-production and may never actually happen.
With or without Carpenter, the remake of Big Trouble In Little China is being produced by and will probably star Dwayne Johnson, sometime in between the approximately 6 million other projects Johnson has planned right now. To his credit, Johnson did say last summer that he wanted to bring Carpenter on “in some capacity,” a sentiment that he has apparently yet to follow up on. Either that, or Johnson did try to contact him and Carpenter missed the call because he was busy jamming on his keyboard, which is entirely possible.