How many famous future cities can the eye-patched badass Snake Plissken escape from? After shooting his way through the Manhattan maximum security prison in the new Escape From New York reboot, Snake will likely go on to escape from many other places, including probably another Escape from Los Angeles, maybe an Escape from Cleveland, and who knows where else.
As reported by Deadline on March 24, acclaimed director Robert Rodriquez will direct a reboot of Escape from New York; sending the John Carpenter dystopian cult classic Escape from New York toward the arena of becoming the next big multi-film franchise. According to Deadline, “the hope is to reinvent the property with an eye toward launching a Planet of the Apes-like franchise.” Presumably, likening Escape from New York to the newer Planet of the Apes films refers to the dystopian tone, rather than giving the new Snake Plissken a talking animal as a sidekick.
The original Escape from New York was released in 1981 and starred Kurt Russell as a former special-forces commando, turned mercenary named Snake Plissken. As part of a crazy rescue mission, guess where Snake has to escape from? The movie spawned only one sequel, the 1996 film Escape from L.A. While the second film wasn’t as beloved by cultish science fiction fans, it was more self-satirizing than the first film and subtly mocked the genre of exploitative violent dystopias. Because Robert Rodriquez also has experience with combing kitsch humor with horror (From Dusk Till Dawn) it’s possible that his take on Escape from New York could be similarly as meta as Escape From L.A. Rodriquez has also been involved in soft reboots of big sci-fi franchises in the past; he was a producer on the film Predators, a film which pitted Adrian Brody against the titular creatures from the original Predator.
Because Snake Plissken destroyed literally all technology on the planet Earth in the final scenes of Escape From L.A., its unlikely that the new film will follow the continuity of the original. Then again, Mad Max: Fury Road managed to fit into the previous Mad Max mythos subtly, and it even recast its leading man. Perhaps the new Escape from New York will do the same. The only remaining question is this: Is there a finite number of escapes Snake can make? Or could this new film franchise go on forever?
