Producer Joel Silver talks the plan for the Escape from New York reboot

February 10th 2014, 9:47pm

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

I know many of you aren’t too keen on it, but producer Joel Silver still keeps talking up that ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK reboot. First, the reboot was in the hands of New Line until the rights lapsed and Silver alongside Studio Canal snatched them up. It’s been a year, and while we’ve been busy trying to even wrap our minds around the idea of someone replacing Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, nothing else has really happened.

Collider caught up with Silver who had a few details on where the reboot was, and what they had planned. First, the producer was asked if a script was complete:

“No, no we’re not, no we’re not. I mean, it’s funny because we have a relationship with Studio Canal, which somehow ended up with the rights to that, and it has been floating around LA or at least in the development world for a long time.”

However, Silver has more than just one film in mind:

“I always liked Kurt’s character, the Snake Plissken character, so I’ve always like that idea, but we kind of figured out a way to do almost a trilogy of that story.”

The biggest question is, what is the idea of the reboot? Oddly, the inspiration comes from a video game that starred the dark knight:

“There was a videogame that came out a few years ago called Arkham City, which shows how when Gotham became this kind of walled prison and how it became a walled prison. And they never deal with that in the story of Escape from New York, so part of our idea was to kind of see how the city became this walled prison and how the Snake Plissken character was a hero and how he became not looked at as a hero. And then, in the middle of the story, would be the movie that we, you know, previously saw about the President’s daughter goes down, he has to go in and get her. And then, you know, they did a sequel, Escape from LA, but I would like to then kind of find a way to have New York go back to a place that we’d like to see what it is today.”

In case you weren’t ready for the reboot, then you’ll be happy to know that Silver and Studio Canal are still in the very early stages of development: