New Line Cinema is quickly moving forward with plans to remake John Carpenter's 1981 dystopian action classic Escape From New York, thanks to a rewrite from Allan Loeb, the man who rescued the Wall Street sequel from development limbo over at Fox. A big reason for the fast track was creative: Loeb nailed the humor in Plissken without slipping into camp, and he changed Snake's rescue-mission target from a president to a female senator, thereby upping the banter quotient.
But just as big a factor was economic: They found a much cheaper way to turn Manhattan into a giant prison.

In the original, set at the end of World War III, New York City was a husk of itself after being turned into a giant prison, but that kind of destruction gets pricey.* So in Escape 2.0, the Big Apple that the as-yet-uncast Snake Plissken is dropped into will be geographically undesirable, but intact: This Manhattan was evacuated and turned into a privately run penal colony after the detonation of a crude radioactive dirty bomb on the outskirts of the city.