Zack Snyder’s Escape from New York remake is happening

Two decades after remaking George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Zack Snyder is tackling another director’s seminal work. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Snyder is attached to write and direct a reimagining of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, the 1981 action movie that introduced the world to Snake Plissken.

Unlike Snyder’s recent straight-to-streaming films Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire and Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, the new Escape from New York is intended for a wide theatrical release. The whole project sounds like early days; the remake “is being put together and will be taken out to market in the coming weeks,” according to THR. John Carpenter will reportedly serve as an executive producer on the film.

If this story feels a little familiar, it’s because there have been previous attempts to remake Escape from New York dating back to 2015. But with Snyder involved in a creative capacity, it may actually happen this time.

The original Escape from New York is a dystopian action film set in the year 1997. Carpenter’s film imagines a United States so overwhelmed by crime that the entirety of Manhattan has been converted into a maximum-security prison. After Air Force One is hijacked by a terrorist group, U.S. President John Harker (Donald Pleasence) is placed in an escape pod that drops into Manhattan — where he is quickly captured by its imprisoned residents. In an attempt to rescue President Harker from a gang leader named The Duke (Isaac Hayes), former special-forces soldier Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is secretly dispatched into the city. Plissken only accepts the job after being promised a pardon for his own crime of robbing a Federal Reserve depository.

Russell’s Plissken returned in a subpar sequel, 1996’s Escape from L.A., and the character was a major inspiration for Metal Gear’s similarly one-eyed protagonist, Solid Snake.

According to Carpenter, he wrote the screenplay for Escape from New York in the mid-’70s, following the Watergate scandal that sank U.S. President Richard Nixon. “The whole feeling in the nation was one of real cynicism about the president,” Carpenter said in 1994. “I wrote the screenplay and no studio wanted to make it. They all said, ‘We’ve been up on the president enough. We can’t have this kind of dark view.'” Yeah. Who can relate?

Whether Snyder will be able to imagine a believable world where audiences would be the President of the United States feels worth saving from his violent captors remains to be seen. The director of 300 and Zack Snyder’s Justice League certainly has his work cut out for him.