The holidays are over now, so it’s back to business as usual in the movie blogging world. You know what that means: freaking out about prequels and remakes. Thankfully for us, some new reasons for worry have come down the pike via a chat The Playlist had with Alcon Entertainment producer Andrew Kosove. After talking a bit about the progress he’s having bringing the Black List script Prisoners to the big screen, he also had some stuff to say about Ridley Scott’s new Blade Runner project and the proposed Point Break remake that has been floating around. Is it looking like they’re really going to happen?
About Scott’s enthusiasm for the new Blade Runner, Kosove said, “Here’s the thing about Ridley. Ridley is a special guy. He’s a force of nature. He’s got a lot of stuff that he’s working on. I believe it’s an extremely high priority for Ridley, that’s what he’s said to me. This project is moving forward aggressively in development.” Look at those words he’s using, high priority, aggressive, sounds like this thing is developing pretty fast. Or is it? The next few words out of his mouth don’t sound so confident.
He went on to say, “Sometime in the first two months of the new year we’ll announce who the screenwriter will be and whether or not it’s a prequel or sequel. And then we’ll be off to the races.” They don’t even have a screenwriter or know if it’s going to be a sequel or a prequel yet? Okay, sigh of relief, we’ve got a while before we have to worry about this one.
But what about that Point Break remake? Turns out it’s more of a reimagining than a remake, if you want to split hairs. Kosove explained, “It’s not a literal remake of the original the way Footloose was — it was identical to the original film. [Our Point Break] has got elements of the original and it’s not just surfing, it’s other kinds of extreme sports, but surfing is very, very prominent in the story.” That’s kind of reassuring, calling something Point Break and not having any surfing in it would be pointless. But how is the pre-production coming along? He says,
“We’re out to a director now, so if it we’re to go in that direction, it’d be a big announcement. We have someone who we think is the perfect filmmaker. I’d be very surprised if we weren’t in pre-production in 2012.” Sounds like more of a definite than the new Blade Runner so far, which kind of sucks, because I’d much rather see Ridley Scott working in the Blade Runner world again than see some dude making a random movie that’s called Point Break. How about you?