Leigh Whannell talks about his upcoming Escape From New York reboot, while out promoting his recent thriller The Invisible Man.
A year ago, the actor/writer/filmmaker was hired to pen the script for the upcoming New York reboot. But the reboot isn’t the only thing on the agenda for Whannell.
Whannell got the call last year to pen the reboot for the John Carpenter classic for 20th Century Fox. Kurt Russell starred in the original that takes place in a dystopian future.
Manhattan’s turned into an island prison. The outlaw, Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), must go inside and rescue the president whose aircraft crashed there.
In a recent interview with JoBlo, Whannell (Upgrade) says fans of the series might see Russell’s son Wyatt in the film. Wyatt recently starred in Lodge 49, the Nazi zombie film Overlord, and the upcoming Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Whannell says that would be an easy answer as it “seems like the obvious thing to win the fans over”. He goes on to talk about the woes of adapting a classic film of this magnitude:
“It’s funny, I’ve been so busy working on this film [The Invisible Man] where I haven’t had time to circle back around on that project. Sometimes these press releases go out before you’re ready, you’re like, ‘Don’t tell the world!’ I don’t actually know, I really don’t.
That is an iconic character and I think that Snake Plissken is a part of people’s childhood and their adolescence. It’s near and dear to them. So I would tread very carefully with that.
I feel like a property like that doesn’t have the same freedom as maybe something like ‘The Invisible Man’ does. He has more elasticity as a character because so many people have had their fingerprints on that.
There’s been TV shows and comic books, whereas with Escape from New York, we’re talking about one definitive movie here and you don’t want to mess with it.
We’ll see what happens.”
Whannell goes on to say that this film won’t follow the path of other recent bloated reboots such as Robocop and Total Recall.
There’s currently no deal set for Whannell to direct Escape from New York.
