Crazies Director Breck Eisner to Helm ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK Remake
The director of The Crazies remake Breck Eisner is going to director another remake of a classic film... Escape From New York. New Line Cinema is the studio that wants to bring the movie to life, they bought the rights to it in 2007 and had Gerard Butler attached to star in the film as Snake. The movie fell into production hell, as it should have, and Butler left the project. Since then it's gone trough a ton of other writers and a couple of director. At one point Len Wiseman (Underworld) was going to direct it, but that didn't last. Then Brett Deutsche Bag Ratner was going to direct it... we can all be thankful that didn't happen! Could you imagine the disaster that film would have been?
So in comes Breck Eisner to take on the challenge of remaking a film that shouldn't be remade. Escape From New York is a priority for New Line, and they are hell bent on making this movie. I really enjoyed Eisner's The Crazies, I think he's a talented director that has room to grow and improve. I'm sure he'll do a great job with the Escape From New York remake. It's just a shame the movie is being remade.
The movie will follow a script written by Allan Loeb (21, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps), which “tries to mix an origin story for anti-hero Snake Plissken and merge it with the story of the 1981 original.” Earlier this year Vulture reported that the studio loved this script and said,
Loeb nailed the humor in Plissken without slipping into camp, and he changed Snake’s rescue-mission target from a president to a female senator, thereby upping the banter quotient. But just as big a factor was economic: They found a much cheaper way to turn Manhattan into a giant prison.
In the story, Manhattan is evacuated and turned into a privately run penal colony after the detonation of a crude radioactive dirty bomb on the outskirts of the city. New York City will be a place that you wouldn't want to visit, but it will be recognizable. It won't be totally destroyed. The film is described not as a disaster movie but as "an exposé of an ecosystem, if you put a huge wall around Manhattan and then dropped in the most f'ed-up, dangerous criminals on Earth."
Snake will be Snake. For New Line to actually land the movie rights to this thing, they had to sign a contract saying that Plissken "must be called 'Snake'"; "must wear an eye patch"; and that he would "always be a 'bad-ass.'" I'm serious. So yes, Snake will be the Snake that John Carpenter envisioned all those years ago. It just wont be played by Kurt Russell, but they've gotta cast a bad-ass actor otherwise New Line will be in breach of contract.
I guess since the movie is being remade it might as well be good, if it can be good. I don't really like where they are taking the story.
What do you all think?