If you've been breathing a sigh of relief lately because you hadn't heard anything new about the planned Escape from New York remake and you assumed it was dead, it's your hubris that got us here. Vulture is reporting that the movie has in fact been revitalized thanks to some script work from Allan Loeb, and having met a few requirements about the character of Snake Plissken-- including that he "always be a bad-ass"-- the movie may be ready to roll quite soon.

Apparently one of the trickiest details was creating Manhattan as a maximum security prison, given that destroying New York City generally requires a massive CGI budget or a lot of foam rubble to spread all over Houston Street. The compromise that Loeb came up with was to represent Manhattan as a kind of private penal colony, one that wasn't really destroyed, just inhabited by nasty criminals. Says a source, “It is an exposé of an ecosystem, if you put a huge wall around Manhattan and then dropped in the most fucked-up, dangerous criminals on Earth."

New Line is apparently moving ahead quickly with the project, and while there's no mention of Gerard Butler in the Vulture story and he hasn't mentioned the project since 2007, he still makes sense as a replacement for Kurt Russell in the lead role. If things are moving as quickly as Vulture makes it sound, we'll know a lot more very, very soon.