Some sequels take years to happen because nobody’s quite sure they should happen at all. This one was different. The character was still popular, the original movie had only grown more beloved with time, and Kurt Russell was more than willing to put the eye patch back on. The problem was getting everybody in the same room—and figuring out what, exactly, Snake Plissken’s next adventure should look like after 15 years away.
That was no small challenge. The first movie had become a cult favorite, and Snake was already the kind of character people didn’t want messed with too much. Make the sequel too familiar, and what’s the point? Make it too different, and you risk losing the thing people came back for in the first place. Carpenter went somewhere in between… sort of. He brought back the attitude, the dark humor, and that wonderfully cranky hero at the center of it all, then decided to make the whole thing considerably bigger. And that’s where things got interesting.
Some sequels take years to happen because Hollywood isn’t sure anybody wants them. Escape from L.A. had the opposite problem. People absolutely wanted to see Snake Plissken again. The first movie had become a cult classic, Kurt Russell had turned Snake into one of his most recognizable characters, and John Carpenter was finally bringing the character back after 15 years. There was just one problem. By the time Snake returned, the world around him had changed.
That didn’t stop Carpenter and Russell from making the movie they wanted to make. In fact, Escape from L.A. doubled down on everything that made the original so strange. Los Angeles had become an island prison after a catastrophic earthquake. The President’s daughter had stolen a devastating weapon. Snake was sent in to get it back. It had the attitude. It had the eye patch. It had Kurt Russell. But the sequel arrived with a $50 million price tag attached to a movie whose predecessor had cost only about $6-7 million. And when audiences didn’t show up, the future of the franchise disappeared with them. Surprisingly, a recent CinemaCon announcement discussed a possible Escape from New York reboot.
When Escape From L.A. opened on August 9, 1996, it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire. The movie opened with about $8.9 million domestically and finished its theatrical run with roughly $25.5 million. Unfortunately, its reported $50 million production budget meant that things were looking real bad. That was an especially painful result for a movie that had been built around a returning cult character and a much larger budget. Unlike a fantasy movie from the ’90s, this movie was unable to appease fans with any sequels.
The reviews weren’t exactly kind to Escape From L.A., either. The original Escape From New York still sits at a respectable 71% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, while its sequel landed quite a bit lower. That’s not exactly the kind of comparison a movie sequel wants hanging over its head… but there’s another side to the story. Carpenter has never really joined the pile-on, either. In fact, he’s defended Escape From L.A. over the years, and in a 2022 interview, he acknowledged that the movie didn’t exactly make a fortune when it opened. What he did notice, though, was that people kept finding it afterward—and, more importantly, they kept sticking up for it. That’s not something you can really measure with an opening-weekend number. Escape From L.A. may not have gotten much love when it first arrived, but the fans who did love it never really let it go.
There was supposed to be another movie. Carpenter had talked about continuing Snake’s story with an idea that became known as Escape From Earth. The concept was simple enough: after everything Snake had survived, there was apparently nowhere left to go except off the planet. But Escape From L.A. didn’t make enough money to justify taking that next step, and the planned continuation never materialized.
