John Carpenter’s 1981 classic Escape From New York is getting the remake treatment from Fox and Studiocanal, which is not a sentence I’m excited to type, but at least John Carpenter is an executive producer, and they tapped Neil Cross, the creator of BBC’s Luther starring Idris Elba, to pen the script, so at least something is going right. And now we finally know more about the changes made in the Escape From New York remake, according to ten story details revealed by The Wrap.
A couple of the biggest changes are that Manhattan isn’t a maximum security prison in the remake, and Snake Plissken isn’t saving the President of the United States in this one. Rather, he’s capturing a playboy heir named Thomas Newton in an artificial-intelligence controlled, drone-filled Manhattan. In other words, this Manhattan sounds more like a gated community, a prison of their own making. Newton is standing in for the Duke of New York as the movie’s villain.
We also finally find out Snake Plissken’s real first name.
His full name in the script is Colonel Robert “Snake” Plissken. Yeah, Snake is definitely a cooler name. Stick with that.
The film will also include an opening scene similar to the one deleted from the original film, in which Plissken is captured while robbing a bank. Other changes include a gender-swapped version of the CIA Deputy Executive Director originally played by Lee Van Cleef, and Plissken’s mission will be complicated by the Hurricane that is en route to New York City. You can read more about the remake’s script over at The Wrap.
