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.
