It must be the week for studios hitting the brakes on certain projects… Mere days after Universal decided it didn’t want to risk Ron Howard’s ambitious adaptation of The Dark Tower series, New Line and Warner Bros. have opted not to move forward on the planned remake/reboot of Escape from New York.

This is one that has been bubbling away in the development soup for years now, with the likes of Brett Ratner, Len Wiseman, Breck Eisner and Jonathan Mostow all having flirted with the idea of directing the film and Gerard Butler, Jeremy Renner and Josh Brolin under consideration to inherit Kurt Russell’s eye patch and scowl as iconic hard nut Snake Plissken. Oh, and it might not come as a surprise to anyone that Warners in particular had recently been trying to convince Tom Hardy that what he really wanted to do was take on Snake, but we doubt he was truly interested. Poisoned chalice, much?

Now, however, it would seem the movie gods have decided that the original Escape has suffered enough indignation simply by having Escape from LA in existence. But don’t go popping the champagne corks just yet – the studio has simply let the remake rights to John Carpenter’s 1981 original lapse, so someone could sweep in and pick them up…