Director Leigh Whannell Wants Wyatt Russell to Play Snake Plissken in the ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK Reboot
A little over a year ago, we learned that Leigh Whannell (The Invisible Man, Saw, Upgrade, Insidious) was hired to write and possibly direct a reboot of the classic John Carpenter film Escape From New York. The filmmaker is still working on the project and in a recent interview with JoBlo, he offered up an update.
When asked about the possibility of casting Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt Russell (Overlord) in the movie to take on the role of Snake Plissken, Whannell said that might actually happen because it “seems like the obvious thing to win the fans over.”
Whannell went on to discuss how difficult it is to adapt an iconic movie like Escape From New York and do it justice. He also talks about how it’s different from The Invisible Man movie he is making:
“It’s funny, I’ve been so busy working on this film where I haven’t had time to circle back around on that project. Sometimes these press releases go out before you’re ready, you’re like, ‘Don’t tell the world!’ I don’t actually know, I really don’t. That is an iconic character and I think that Snake Plissken is a part of people’s childhood and their adolescence. It’s near and dear to them. So I would tread very carefully with that. I feel like a property like that doesn’t have the same freedom as maybe something like ‘The Invisible Man’ does. He has more elasticity as a character because so many people have had their fingerprints on that. There’s been TV shows and comic books, whereas with Escape from New York, we’re talking about one definitive movie here and you don’t want to mess with it. We’ll see what happens.”
Whannell’s version of Escape From New York is said to have a “new vision,” and it “will retain elements of the original but bring new ideas to the table. One of Whannell's goals is to avoid the bloated tentpole remake path that afflicted the reboots of other 1980s-era movies such as Robocop and Total Recall.”
I like Whannell’s work, and I’m curious to see if he could effectively pull this off and actually give us a decent reboot even though the film doesn’t really need a reboot. As for casting Wyatt Russell in the role, I don’t have any issues with that. In the end, if it’s not Kurt Russell… does it even really matter?
The original movie was set in a futuristic 1997. Russell played Snake Plissken, a badass former special forces operative and convict who is conscripted to rescue the President of the United States after Air Force One crashes in New York, which has been transformed into a maximum security prison. Plissken is given 22 hours to liberate the president and a tape he carries that holds the key to peace. If he doesn't pull it off... he'll explode.
What do you think about the possibility of Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt taking on the role of Snake in the reboot?