Silver Talks Escape From New York Redux

The last we heard was that producers Joel Silver and Andrew Rona were mounting another attempt to remake director John Carpenter's 1981 classic Escape from New York as part of a new trilogy which would begin with an origin tale.

 The original movie  saw hard ass anti-hero Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) living in a near future totalitarian United States where Manhattan Island has been turned into a maximum security prison and Plissken has one day to rescue the U.S. President (Donald Pleasance) who is being held hostage there.

Gerard Butler, Timothy Olyphant, Jason Statham and Tom Hardy have all been linked to play Russell's iconic role at various points in time over the years for  New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. with Len Wiseman and Breck Eisner attached to direct along the way. The studios let their option expire a number of years ago. The film rights now reside at Sudio Canal

Silver was asked by Collider to provide an update on where things stand

When asked if the film's script was finished:

"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 L.A. or at least in the development world for a long time. 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. There was a video game that came out a few years ago called Batman: 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 L.A., 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. So there is a way to tell the story in three ways, but we haven't got there yet and we're just starting"