Escape From New York Remake: 10 Actors Who Should Play Snake Plissken
Don't worry, Gerard Butler isn't included.
It’s been six years since a remake of a John Carpenter classic reached our screens, and while Blumhouse toils on its mooted Halloween reboot, Twentieth Century Fox has announced plans to remake Escape From New York.
Scripted by Neil Cross (Luther) and set to be directed by Robert Rodriguez (Machete), this version will hopefully wash away the bad taste left by previous remakes of Carpenter’s films, most notoriously 2005’s The Fog. Then there was Carpenter’s spat with Rob Zombie, who he called a “piece of sh*t” after hearing comments made by Zombie while making Halloween.
Escape From New York has already been remade as– or more accurately ripped off by – Lockout (2012), a futuristic action thriller so similar to Carpenter’s original premise that he took the producers to court and won. Audiences couldn’t care less and the film made a measly $14 million in the US.
The prospect of a remake raises several questions: is Manhattan still a giant maximum-security prison? Will the movie retain the race-against-time-to-rescue-the-President plotline? More importantly, who’ll play Snake Plissken?
10. Kurt Russell (Obviously)
It’s been more than two decades since he last played Snake (in the less than ecstatically received Escape From L.A.), but not considering Kurt Russell seems like an insult.
Few people remember that Carpenter and Russell first worked together on the Elvis TV movie, which prompted the filmmaker to consider Russell for future parts, figuring that if he could pull off playing The King he could do anything (weirdly enough, Elvis played a character named John Carpenter in Change Of Habit, his final film).
Of all the movies on Russell’s resume – and he was in much bigger films than Escape From New York, including Backdraft and Stargate – Plissken is arguably the character he’ll be remembered for. Russell gives him a swagger that in the hands of a lesser actor would make him seem like a laughable caricature of a spaghetti western antihero, but whenever he growls at someone to “Call me Plissken”, the audience isn’t laughing.