We know that Robert Rodriguez is directing the upcoming reboot of John Carpenter's classic Escape from New York and that Neil Cross has written the script. Today we have now learned that John Carpenter has not only read said script, he has given it the "green light"! This film will serve as a prequel to Carpenter's original.
Neil Cross speaking with Deadline:
“Robert Rodriguez is attached to direct and it’s looking good and exciting,” Cross told the site. “It was quite a challenging script, it’s a challenging thing to reinvent. One of the most terrifying sentences I’ve ever heard in my life is ‘we’ve given the script to John Carpenter’. I crawled around for three days thinking ‘oh my god’ but we got John Carpenter’s seal of approval. He approved it and that’s all I need.”
Cross continues, “You never quite know [if it’s done] but I might need to do some rewrites and do some nip and tuck but in the first approximation, my job is done.”
As far as we know, John Carpenter is still going to executive produce the film in which the studio hopes to launch into a franchise in the same style of Planet of the Apes.