Sci-Fi Film and Television Developments

Escape From New York (Prequel)

4/23/10 – The Snake Plissken origin story, the Escape From New York antihero, is back on track, according to The Hollywood Reporter.  Breck Eisner is negotiating with New Line to take charge of the remake of Escape From New York.  The studio has had the rights to the remake since March 2007 but hasn't been able to make much progress. At one point it looked as if Gerard Butler would star in the role created by Kurt Russell, with Len Wiseman directing, but both soon left the project.

2/11/10 - New Line Cinema is moving forward with plans to remake John Carpenter's 1981 dystopian action classic Escape From New York, thanks to a rewrite from Allan Loeb. A big reason for the fast track was creative: 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.  In the original, set at the end of World War III, New York City was a husk of itself after being turned into a giant prison, but that kind of destruction gets pricey. So in Escape 2.0, the Big Apple that the as-yet-uncast Snake Plissken is dropped into will be geographically undesirable, but intact: This Manhattan was evacuated and turned into a privately run penal colony after the detonation of a crude radioactive dirty bomb on the outskirts of the city. The authorities will still be on Liberty Island, though this time around it's a private KBR-like security company.

12/31/06 - New Line has won the bidding war for this remake.  Gerald Butler would portray Snake Plissken, the convict and war hero who's sent into a futuristic New York City—which has been turned into a giant maximum-security prison—to rescue the president after his plane is knocked down by terrorists.

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