Movies
Piece of Cake, ‘Duke Nukem’ Movie Adds ‘Assassin’s Creed’ Producer
Combine Evil Dead‘s Ash and They Live‘s Nada and you get Duke Nukem, the 80s-inspired badass who once starred in a series of really cool video games.
Now, after years in development over at Paramount, Gearbox Software is teaming with Assassin’s Creed producer Jean-Julien Baronnet to adapt the video game into a feature film, Variety reports.
As the site notes, Gearbox had been working on Duke Nukem with Paramount Studios and Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes, with John Cena rumored as a possible star earlier this year. Paramount, however, is no longer involved in the project.
According to the story, they’re going back to square one. Gearbox’s Sean Haren, the company’s vice president of business development, and Baronnet from Marla Studios have been meeting with writers in recent weeks to start preparing a package for a potential Duke Nukem film. They assert that the brawny Nukem — who uses catchphrases like “piece of cake,” “see you hell” and “so help me Duke” — has solid potential as a live-action movie character.
“He’s a parody of 1980s action heroes and he’s like Deadpool in terms of being able to break the fourth wall,” Haren said.
“We see a lot of humor in his confronting the values of today while trying to save the world.”
Baronnet agrees, adding, “Duke is exactly the kind of very blunt character that we need in the world today.”
Duke Nukem first appeared in the 1991 eponymous video game, developed by Apogee Software, as a muscular cigar-chomping man who always wears Ray-Bans and sports a flat-top haircut as he fights aliens to save planet Earth by using enormous physical strength and his expertise in firearms. He’s appeared in 19 video games as the title character, most recently in “Duke Nukem 3D: World Tour”.
It was announced two years ago that filmmaking team Radio Silence (Ready or Not, Scream, Scream VI, Abigail) were working on bringing Snake Plissken back to the screen for a brand new movie based on John Carpenter’s Escape from New York for 20th Century Studios, with John Carpenter himself on board as an executive producer of the upcoming movie.
The project had originally been described as a “reboot,” but filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett had described it as more of a “requel.” Unfortunately, the pair revealed to Comicbook.com that they’re no longer developing the requel and have parted ways with the project.
Gillett told the outlet, “We are not, unfortunately. I think titles like that bounce around for a while and I think they’ve tried to get that out of the blocks a few times. I think it’s just ultimately a tricky rights issue thing. There’s a clock on it and we just weren’t in a position to make the clock, ultimately. But who knows? I think, in hindsight, it feels crazy that we would think we would, post-Scream, step into a John Carpenter franchise. You never know. There’s still interest in it and we’ve had a few conversations about it but we’re not attached in any official capacity.”
Escape from New York was set in 1997. “When the U.S. president crashes into Manhattan, now a giant maximum security prison, a convicted bank robber is sent in to rescue him.”
In Escape from LA, also directed by John Carpenter, “Snake Plissken is once again called in by the United States government to recover a potential doomsday device from Los Angeles, now an autonomous island where undesirables are deported.”
Radio Silence is fresh off of helming gory vampire movie Abigail. It’s the third vampire movie from the Universal Monsters brand in the past year, the film scaring up $34.7 million at the worldwide box office these past few weeks. That gives it a higher worldwide gross than both The Last Voyage of the Demeter ($21.7 million) and Renfield ($26.4 million), and it’s also the most critically successful of the three vampire movies. Abigail also just landed on Premium VOD, so you can watch at home now.
Stay tuned for additional details on the Escape from New York requel, and what’s next for Radio Silence.
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