It looks like Fox is determined to remake John Carpenter’s classic Escape from New York. The studio has set its sights on Robert Rodriguez, of Sin City, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Machete to direct.

This news comes via Jeff Sneider at The Tracking Board, and marks an interesting development not only for Escape from New York, but also for the live-action Alita: Battle Angel. Rodriguez is hot off directing the anime adaptation, and it would seem that Fox likes what they see, since they’ve hired him on again to another, more high-profile project.

The original 1981 Escape from New York stars Kurt Russell as “Snake” Plissken, a prisoner who’s dropped into futuristic dystopian New York to rescue the president. Manhattan has become a maximum-security prison due to a 400% increase in crime, and Plissken has 24 hours to rescue the Commander-in-Chief before micro-explosives injected into his body detonate. The original movie was an instant success, the totally bizarre future Carpenter had concocted and Russell’s own brand of charm led them to make a sequel set in Los Angeles. But the remake sounds like it has some pretty key differences, and may not even be a straight-up remake at all.

Rodriguez also has a flair for the totally bizarre, but in quite a different way from Carpenter. His movies — especially Sin City — are highly stylized, creating gritty, low-lit atmospheres for nefarious criminals to lurk. It doesn’t need remaking (she shouted into the void), but Rodriguez is actually an intriguing choice for the reboot. They have yet to cast their Plissken, so we’ll see about that.

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