Updated: Jeremy Renner tells MTV that he's never been approached to play Snake in an Escape From New York redo, it's just rumours. He says there's more truth to Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters he is supposedly attached to with Noomi Rapace but he's not sure if it's going ahead. Also he remains committed to PTA's anti-Scientology movie despite it's production trouble. The talk is in the below interview but it takes a few minutes before they get onto these topics...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MQvupZG4ds I'm sure I speak for the majority when I say we'd rather see
Kurt Russell star in
Escape From Earth, the final chapter of the legendary series he and
John Carpenter started in the 80's than watch a johnny-come-lately reboot this saga - but prequel chapter entries to perfectly good films made yonks ago is the nature of the times, isn't it? (see The Thing, Scott's new Alien picture, etc).
Bloody Disgusting report that
Jeremy Renner has emerged as an early contender to fill Snake Plisken's boots in
Breck Eisner (The Crazies) and New Line's origin story that will act as a reboot, remake and a prequel all in one when it films next year.
New Line's movie, which has had three different writers (
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Allan Loeb has turned in the draft the studio are most keen on) and two previous directors (
Len Wiseman,
Brett Ratner) and even a former lead in
Gerard Butler - will be a fresh look at Plissken, probably focusing on how he changed from a war veteran into the the bank robber that saw him arrested at the beginning of the original movie - before re-treading the familiar ground of the 1981 anti-establishment classic. So yes, it's another movie that will pull back the mystery curtain and I've lost count how many times we have become disappointed by what we see...
Renner, I guess, is as solid a choice as you could probably find for a redo. His recent performance in
The Town was quite breathtaking and he has the right bad-ass attitude and full-on masculinity to at least not look silly wearing the eye-patch and boots, and delivering the one-liners. But honestly, I never really need to see any other actor but Kurt Russell play Snake Pliskken.
Vulture have read Loeb's script and write that it;
nailed the humor in Plissken without slipping into camp, and he changed Snakes rescue-mission target from a president to a female senator, thereby upping the banter quotient.
Manhatten has also being changed to a;
geographically undesirable, but intact privately run penal colony which was created after the detonation of a crude radioactive dirty bomb on the outskirts of the city.
And Eisner previously told
Coming Soon;
Conceptually, its an idea thats not true today because of the world we live in. So, how the prison is created is going to be different than in Carpenters version. The anxiety of the world and anxiety of our existence post-9/11 is there, especially the anxiety in Manhattan post-9/11. Plot-wise, theyre different, emotionally theyre very similar. Thats why itll be interesting to tackle this movie, to have a slightly different take but with the same results which is Manhattan is turned into a walled prison.