Joe Carnahan's THE RAID Remake Has Been Reworked Into a Different Film Project Titled ZENO

A few years ago it was announced that director Joe Carnahan (Smokin’ Aces, The A-Team) was hired to helm a remake of the badass action movie The Raid. A lot of fans of the original film didn’t care for this movie getting remade, but now you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Carnahan is no longer directing a remake of The Raid, but he has taken the script he wrote for it and reworked it into a completely new film project titled Zeno. During a recent interview with Collider, the filmmaker revealed that XYZ films still hold the rights to The Riad, but he is not working with them on the project. This new film is something he’s doing on his own. When previously talking about his version of The Raid, which would have starred Frank Grillo, Carnahan said:

“You meet Frank’s character having just rotated back from a really, really, brutal special forces operation. He’s got soft tissue damage in his hands, and his rotator cuff is blown out, and they take fluid off his knees, and the doctors basically tell him, ‘Listen you’re at the razor’s edge of PTSD and you need three months of just nothing, some R&R, because you’re jacked up.’ And in that space he gets the message that his brother, who he thought had been dead for four years, is actually alive and working for a very bad guy in Caracas, and in 18 hours they’re gonna kill his brother. These forces are gonna descend and murder the bad guy and murder the brother, so do you wanna go and get your brother, who you thought is dead? Do you want that opportunity? So that’s where we start.”

In this most recent interview, Carnahan said:

“The version that I wrote, [the police] don’t ever intend to actually go in [to the crime lord’s building]. They think that they’re gonna move this guy. So their whole operation is, ‘we’re gonna hit this guy in transit.’ It’s not until they realize, ‘Oh, they’re digging in, they’re not moving, we’ve got to now go in and get him.’ It’s a very, very different script…It’s really, really, really about the brothers.

So, this is the film that we are going to see. It just won’t be The Raid, which is fine! This is a different enough story to set it apart. Carnahan added that he is currently in negotiations with a “big star” to play the lead, and another actor has already signed on to play the villain. We don’t know who either of these actors are, though.

With XYZ still having the rights to The Raid, I assume that at some point down the road, they will remake the movie. That’s obviously something they can do if they want.

What do you all think about Carnahan ditching The Raid remake to make this new film that was inspired by it?