Another filmmaker is going to take a crack at Snake Plissken. Studiocanal used its CinemaCon opening slot in Las Vegas on April 14 to confirm it’s developing a reimagining of Escape from New York, teaming up with The Picture Company — the production outfit that most recently delivered A Complete Unknown.
Hugh Spearing, the studio’s EVP of Global Marketing and Distribution, made the announcement but kept details deliberately vague. No director is attached, no writer, no cast, no release window. More news is coming “soon,” apparently.
For anyone who missed the original: Kurt Russell plays Snake Plissken, a disgraced special forces veteran doing time as a federal prisoner. The deal on the table is simple — rescue the U.S. President, who has crash-landed inside a sealed-off Manhattan that now functions as one giant penitentiary, and walk free. Carpenter shot it for $6 million in 1981; it made back more than $25 million at the box office and spent the next four decades becoming one of those films people keep trying to remake. A sequel, Escape from L.A., came out in 1996 — Carpenter and Russell both returned, the audience largely did not.
This is far from the first attempt to bring Snake Plissken back to the big screen. Len Wiseman was attached at New Line around 2007–2010, Breck Eisner was developing a version at Fox in 2015, and Robert Rodriguez was announced in 2022 at 20th Century Studios. Most recently, Radio Silence — the directing team behind Scream (2022) and Scream VI — were developing a reimagining with The Picture Company also involved, before moving on to The Mummy sequel. Leigh Whannell also worked on a script at one point, reportedly aiming to avoid the bloated blockbuster approach that hurt remakes like RoboCop and Total Recall.
Worth noting: Studiocanal has owned the rights to the original since long before this announcement — a fact that became publicly visible in 2016 when Luc Besson lost a plagiarism suit to the studio over Lockout.
The Escape from New York news was one of several announcements from Studiocanal’s CinemaCon presentation. Also on the slate: Paddington 4, a reimagining of Joe Dante’s 1981 werewolf horror The Howling, Sean Byrne’s thriller The Mannequin starring Melissa Leo, and a big-screen adaptation of Matt Haig’s bestselling novel The Midnight Library.
Whether this latest attempt will finally make it to production remains to be seen. The property has defeated every filmmaker attached to it for the better part of two decades.