If it's going to be like any of the remakes of Carpenter movies (nicely listed in post
#18 here), it's going to be forgettable, or be a new movie with an old-reference title.
I think this is the best Carpenter movie after
The Thing. But I fear that the underlying problem is that the story no longer works today. So I am very concerned what they make of it - yet another sequel/remake to ignore and erase from your brain matrix?
Like
Assault on Precinct 13 and
Halloween (even
The Fog),
Escape from New York was born out of a specific 1970s socio-political atmosphere where lack of social cohesion, economic insecurity and downward mobility, rampant political decay and massively-rising criminality, and a complete disillusionment with trust in institutions were everyday topics.
Escape came out in time for Reagan, just when cynicism and me-only-culture became popular and made these problems all easier to swallow and digestible
(preferably with lots of money to be made from them). Hence why Snake Plissken is such a well-working character creation for this film and its time. There was a wonderful interview broadcast on German television a decade ago where Carpenter and the interviewer discussed all this really well in light of what Carpenter suggested was his take on Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' concept (his words - pretty heady stuff, this interview... I have it on a VHS tape, awaiting to be digitised if I ever find the will to invest the time needed).
Today,
Escape has great atmosphere and the visuals are still great and work, but for a remake or re-imagining, the entire vision of a prison island, a martial police state, the presidential subplot... it just no longer works in a world of Guantanamo, internet privacy v the state, and
Lincoln-Vampire-Hunter-audiences.
To successfully redo/update/rework all this, I think one would require a completely new script, and this would just leave the title and nothing much... so why bother with the title? As if the title
Escape from New York has so much mainstream cachet to guarantee a box-office+dvd-sales profit...
Would
The Walking Dead have been more successful if it would have been called
Dawn of the Dead?.