Zack Snyder Is Set to Direct Reimagining of ‘John Carpenter’s Escape From New York’
The march towards creative oblivion continues, and at an ever-increasing pace. All forms of originality and innovation have been exiled to the remote maximum security prison colony of Bygone Eras. There is no escape from this place, but even if there was, those who do would find themselves washing ashore to a sterile, decayed world of chilling familiarity that has forgotten them long ago, even if everyone still remembers their name.
2026. NOW.
Deadline has confirmed that the patron saint of slow-motion camera shots, Zack Snyder (Sucker Punch), will write and direct a reimagining of John Carpenter’s seminal 1981 dystopian sci-fi/action classic, Escape From New York.
StudioCanal, who shares the IP rights with Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13, They Live, In the Mouth of Madness), announced a plan to reboot the film at CinemaCon in Las Vegas last April, but that has been updated with a more palatable euphemism featuring The Picture Company & The Stone Quarry as co-producers, and even the 78-year-old king of cult cinema himself will be getting a piece of the action as he sits in what will most likely be the most comfortable Executive Producer chair on set.
The original Escape From New York stars Kurt Russell (The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Tombstone, Bone Tomahawk) as cinema’s greatest antihero, S. D. “Snake” Plissken. He’s a highly decorated Special Forces lieutenant for the United States Army turned individualistic outlaw who gets busted robbing the Federal Reserve, and receives a life sentence in the New York Maximum Security Penitentiary.
Snake is accosted by Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) while going through processing. He accepts the offer for a full pardon of all criminal actions if he can infiltrate the condemned city to rescue The President (Donald Pleasence) after a Donna Mills doppelganger (Nancy Stephens) hijacks his federally funded aircraft. The terrified Evader-In-Chief managed to flee the scene by using an escape pod right before she crashed his entire cabinet into Lower Manhattan.
Armed with a MAC 10, a Smith & Wesson, and his trusty combat knife, this rehired gun scours the nearly-deserted wasteland of perpetual night with a deadline of only twenty-three hours to find the impotent elected official before he misses a historical peace summit, and to clear up the widespread rumor of his apparent demise.
If he’s late, the micro-explosives that were injected into his carotid arteries will make a red splatter across the sidewalk, and that popular “Dead Snake” rumor will turn into an objective fact faster than he can light up a smoke. The film also stars Adrienne Barbeau, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, and the late-great Isaac Hayes as the Duke of New York, A-Number One!
There is still no word yet on the story, casting, or if they’ll have enough spinal fluid to actually film it on location, but seeing the ubiquitous term “reimagining” is enough to have even the most optimistic of modern moviegoers steering their glider towards the dark, overcrowded skies of weary skepticism.
You may have survived Rupert Wainwright’s The Fog (2005). You may have escaped from Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), but this is the Culture of Cannibalism, John Carpenter fans, and you’re about to find out that this f──g place can shill anybody!
John Carpenter’s Escape From New York is available to stream on Roku, and a particularly awesome retro trailer is below:
