It's kind of tough to assess just how much it matters that John Carpenter has given his approval to the script for a reboot of one of his movies, since the filmmaker has been very open about the fact that he doesn't care what is done with the properties he created as long as he gets paid. I mean, he's even credited as a producer on the remake of his film THE FOG, one of the most atrocious remakes ever made. So when he read the screenplay Neil Cross wrote for a reboot of his 1981 classic ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, was he giving it an honest evaluation, or was he just taking a "Yeah, sure, whatever" approach to looking it over?
I'd like to think that Carpenter wasn't just shrugging off the project and really did approve of what Cross has written.
Speaking with Deadline about the new ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, Cross said,
Robert Rodriguez is attached to direct and it’s looking good and exciting. It was quite a challenging script, it’s a challenging thing to reinvent. One of the most terrifying sentences I’ve ever heard in my life is ‘we’ve given the script to John Carpenter’. I crawled around for three days thinking ‘oh my god’ but we got John Carpenter’s seal of approval. He approved it and that’s all I need. You never quite know [if it’s done] but I might need to do some rewrites and do some nip and tuck but in the first approximation, my job is done."
Details on Cross's script were revealed by TheWrap last year, and it didn't sound very promising to me. As we shared exactly one year ago today,
Cross has set his ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK apart from the original in a major way by jettisoning the idea of New York being a walled-in prison. While the future as a whole isn't bright in his script, his Manhattan is a breathtaking utopia with a sky full of drones that are controlled by an artificial intelligence called April. When Superstorm Ellery blows in to the island, the flaws in April's system show through, making the city vulnerable.
Agrochemical and biotech heir Thomas Newton is trapped on the island and needs rescued, so CIA Deputy Executive Director Roberta Hauk (a female version of the role originally played by Lee Van Cleef) recruits military Colonel turned criminal Robert "Snake" Plissken – this Snake has a first name! – to pull off the mission. And he's only given 11 hours to do so.
Unfortunately, Newton is actually the film's villain, and he's in possession of " an ominous, dull metal sphere about the size of a car, in a nest of conduits and cabling", a device he calls Fat Boy.
Cross's previous credits including writing MAMA and creating the BBC series Luther. He has written a sequel to MAMA, but "God knows what's happening with that", and is currently working on a "big dumb monster movie" called INSIDE.
Carpenter will be receiving an executive producer credit on the remake of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. He's also actively participating in Blumhouse and David Gordon Green's upcoming sequel to HALLOWEEN.