Nigh-on a year ago, we brought you the questionable word that Hollywood nexus producer Joel Silver, of “Die Hard,” “The Matrix,” “Sherlock Holmes” and a dozen or more major blockbusters, had got his hands on the rights to remake John Carpenter‘s 1981 classic “Escape From New York,” one of the more hellaciously fun films ever made. Silver has been (uncharacteristically) quiet on his plans for the property ever since… until now (dun dun dun).
Over at Collider, Silver has revealed “we kind of figured out a way to do almost a trilogy of that story.” How, you ask, do you make three movies from one, especially when that one had a pretty tissue-thin plot in the first place? Well:
“There was a videogame that came out a few years ago called ‘Arkham City,’ which shows how 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, this is… a little confusing? As best we can tell, Silver seems to conflate the happenings of “Escape from New York” and the ’90s sequel “Escape from L.A”—it’s the latter in which the President’s daughter is taken hostage—but we guess the idea is to have a first movie about the establishment of Manhattan as a mega-prison, a second movie that basically retells “Escape from New York,” and a third that uses the President’s daughter plotline but is, again, set in New York? That seems to be the best way to make sense of it, but let us know if you read it any differently below. Of course, this is an only-marginally-crazier plan than actually escaping from a Manhattan populated solely by vicious criminals, and Silver cheerfully admits to not having a script or a director yet, so we shall see.