Alcon Producer Updates on Blade Runner and Point Break

Last week, The Playlist had a chance to speak to Alcon Entertainment producer Andrew Kosove and they got him to update them on a number of upcoming Alcon projects including a pair of remakes/relaunches the company is working on, one being a follow-up to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the other being a remake of Kathryn Bigelow’s action-thriller Point Break.

Kasave told them that the Blade Runner project is a “high priority” for Ridley Scott, who is in post-production on the anticipated Prometheus (and already on record saying they have ideas for two more movies if it does well), and that project is “moving forward aggressively in development.”

“Sometime in the first two months of the new year we’ll announce who the screenwriter will be and whether or not it’s a prequel or sequel. And then we’ll be off to the races,” he added.

As far as the Point Break remake, here is what he told them about whether surfing may be replaced by “extreme sports”:

“This is the thing — surfing is a part of it, but I will tell you that we believe firmly, in terms of remaking a film like this, we’ve got to make it fresh,”Kosove said. He then cited a recent 1980s remake of an example of what “Point Break” would not be. “It’s not a literal remake of the original the way ‘Footloose’ was — it was identical to the original film. [Our ‘Point Break’] has got elements of the original and it’s not just surfing, it’s other kinds of extreme sports, but surfing is very, very prominent in the story.” He says that the folks at Alcon have figured out who they want to direct, but they can’t announce just yet. “We’re out to a director now, so if it were to go in that direction, it’d be a big announcement. We have someone who we think is the perfect filmmaker. I’d be very surprised if we weren’t in pre-production in 2012.”

They also checked with him on what was going on with Prisoners, a long gestating revenge thriller that lost Leonardo DiCaprio and director Antoine Fuqua but gained director Denis Villeneuve, helmer of the French-Canadian Oscar nominee Incendies. As might be expected, the hardest part has been finding the two-leads, one being a “Bible-reading, deer hunting survivalist who takes the law into his own hands after his 6-year-old daughter and her friend are kidnapped,” another being the detective who failed to find the kidnapper and the kidnapper himself, who becomes prisoner to the angry father.

Kosove told them what they’re looking for. “It has to be a character actor with leading man qualities that will fit the tonality. Because the character has to do some very ugly things. Leonardo DiCaprio was attached for a long time and had veto power for the director, which we could never work out. Jeremy Renner is someone who we always loved for this and would have done it if we had gotten to him a little earlier, but by the time we got off of Leo and went to him, the whole ‘Bourne [Legacy]’ thing was going on. Even though we were engaged in the project. We’ve just been trying to figure out the casting.”

The statement above makes one think that getting an actor they can afford for such a tough film–Alcon notoriously tries to keep their production budgets on the lower side–but many names have been mentioned with no one signing on the dotted line.

Kosove confirmed that Villeneuve is still attached and a casting announcement could happen sometime in the next couple of months.

You can read updates on other Alcon projects including an adaptation of the animated Hong Kong Phooey and projects that were to be directed by Denzel Washington and Spike Lee over on The Playlist.