According to Deadline, producer Joel Silver has been trying to remake Logan’s Run with Warner Bros for nearly twenty years—following the cult success of the 1976 film adaptation—but now it seems as if it will finally happen. After various iterations (including Nicholas Winding Refn’s take that would have starred Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes, and a version in which the eponymous Logan 3 is a woman), WB has landed on not a remake of the movie, but an adaptation of the original 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Ryan Condal (co-creator of USA’s Colony) will write the screenplay, from a treatment written by Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Apocalypse) based on the book.
As Ryan Britt wrote in his reclamation of Logan’s Run, most people know the movie, TV, and comic book adaptations better than the source material. While the film depicted a dystopian society in which citizens live hedonistic lives until they are executed on their 30th birthdays (either willingly or chased down by “Sandmen”), the book set 21 as the inhabitants’ “Lastday.” Furthermore, Nolan and Johnson sought to emphasize the dangers of such hedonism, which inevitably comes with a time limit. As Nolan explained in a 2000 interview:
I wrote Logan’s Run during the Watts riots, when youth were rioting. The book was an implicit criticism of a lifestyle that destroys you and society, a lifestyle where maturity is rejected. You can’t live a hedonistic lifestyle and survive—you either die young or it catches up with you.
At the time of the interview, there was an earlier remake in the works. Nolan commented on it, sharing his hope for something hewing closer to his and Johnson’s original idea:
I think the original movie missed the book’s subtext, which is the breakdown of society when youth rules. I don’t think this is a dated idea, either. Look at all the violence out there now—Watts is nothing compared to rap music or wrestling shows on TV. Dying of an early death is even more a fear in youth culture today.
Ditto for sixteen years later. What will be especially interesting is who they’ll cast; when your protagonist is only 21, that means the studio will likely pull from the current crop of actors starring in YA films, and/or find unknowns. So long as Kinberg doesn’t stick to his original idea of echoing The Hunger Games; there’s already so much in Logan’s Run that it doesn’t need an arena or a Capitol to dilute its message.
The 1976 original is awesome. I would like to see a remake of this for sure.
“…WB has landed on not a remake of the movie, but an adaptation of the original 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson.”
When was it decided that a new adaptation of the source novel could not be called a remake? I’ve always understood that to be an acceptable use of the term.
Here’s an idea. Instead of remaking a movie that has already been made, why not make a completely NEW movie that is based on an important / popular SF classic that has never appeared on the big screen. I am so tired of remakes and sequels and there are so many great SF books that have never been made into films. The book Logan’s Run was an interesting read but it is hardly considered an SF classic, at least not on the level of LeGuin, Dick, Gibson (etc….). We are deluged by mediocre remakes and comic book movies whose source material doesn’t come close to some of the classics of science fiction. How about mining the really great vein of SF literature and leave the remakes alone already.
“Watts is nothing compared to rap music or wrestling shows on TV.”
… Really? A riot that actually killed over 30 people and injured thousands is nothing compared to a style of music or scripted athletics?
This attitude recontextualizes Logan’s Run as a fairly nasty work, I think. I’m down with talking about the dangers of a culture that venerates youth and rejects maturity, but that means we need to be cautious about, say, Silicon Valley lifestyle norms. Not the behavior of people fed up with racist policing, or wrestling (again, huh?!)
@3/Jeff: There is nothing wrong with remakes. Most of the great literature in the history of the world has consisted of retellings of pre-existing stories, myths, or historical events, because the concept of telling an entirely original story is a historically recent innovation (“novels” were called that because the fact that they told new — novel — stories was unusual enough to be their defining trait). Virtually every one of Shakespeare’s plays is a remake of some earlier work. Most great operas are based on pre-existing tales. And so on. In the millennia before mass literacy and printing, retelling stories was the only way to preserve them for posterity.
And many of the most acclaimed motion pictures ever made are adaptations or remakes. In the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 American movies of all time, every single one of the top eleven films is based on some pre-existing source, whether a book or a play or a short story or a historical personage or a series of news articles (for On the Waterfront) or a set of existing songs that a story was constructed to bridge together (for Singin’ in the Rain). So clearly the idea that only original stories can be any good is false. Yes, there are mediocre remakes, but there are just as many mediocre original movies. That’s just Sturgeon’s Law. Quality isn’t about where your ideas come from, it’s about what you do with them.
I’m with @3. The movie was done, and done well already. A person who see wresting as worse than a riot that killed people has a skewed view of life & history.
I too would like to see some of the newer books adapted and adapted well come to life.
Brandon Sanderson has sold the movie rights to most of his books, yet no movie has happened yet. Some of those rights have been sold for years. Bring on one of those!