It’s been a fair while since we’ve heard anything on the long-gestating Escape from New York redo – something that had many longtime fans hoping that the project had been completely scrapped – but now comes word that the iconic John Carpenter has given the proverbial thumbs up to the screenplay now in place for the reboot.

Screenwriter Neil Cross revealed the news, explaining to Deadline, “Robert Rodriguez is attached to direct and it’s looking good and exciting. It was quite a challenging script, it’s a challenging thing to reinvent. One of the most terrifying sentences I’ve ever heard in my life is ‘we’ve given the script to John Carpenter’. I crawled around for three days thinking ‘oh my god’ but we got John Carpenter’s seal of approval. He approved it and that’s all I need. You never quite know but I might need to do some rewrites and do some nip and tuck, but in the first approximation my job is done.”

Whether you’re keen on the idea of a new take on Escape from New York or not, the crux of this is that Carpenter giving the script the A-OK means that we should all brace ourselves for things to start moving forward once more on this redo.

As Cross mentioned, From Dusk till Dawn’s Robert Rodriguez is set to direct, although the more pressing topic for many is who could possibly take over the role of one of the coolest characters in all of cinema: Snake Plissken. Snake was famously played by Kurt Russell in 1981’s Escape from New York and its 1996 follow-up, Escape from L.A. Previously, names such as The Punisher’s Jon Bernthal and Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam were believed to be amongst the frontrunners to play Plissken.

Expect more on the Escape from New York remake as and when it continues to develop.

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