While not too much is known about the new upcoming Escape From New York film from the filmmaking collective Radio Silence, the group has confirmed that the film is a “requel” — at least, in its early stages.
Speaking to Comicbook.com, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett — two-thirds of the collective — revealed that the upcoming film isn’t fully fleshed out yet, but is a “requel” as it stands.
“It’s a great question. I don’t think we know enough about the movie yet to be able to say anything, but yes ‘requel’ is the idea,” the directors said. “There’s no way to remake how great that movie is, would be a fool’s errand to try. So, you know, we’ll try to borrow what we love from it and find a new way to put the package together.”
Their latest comments echo that of what they said late last year, when they confirmed that the film would not be a remake whatsoever, and that the film is simply “one of those properties that you can’t” redo, calling the original film “untouchable” in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly.
“Not a remake,” said Gillett at the time. “That’s one of those properties that you can’t [remake], it’s sort of untouchable to us, and lives in its own stratosphere in terms of how important it is to us, and how much we love it. So it’ll be not unlike Scream, I think, a nod to, and a continuation of, what we love about those characters and that world.”
The original 1981 John Carpenter classic was set in a future (then 1997) where Manhattan had been turned into an island-sized maximum-security prison. When the president of the United States crashes into the decaying city, an outlaw (played by Kurt Russell) is coerced into traveling inside to rescue him.