Ana Lily Amirpour may have taken a ding on her last feature, 2017’s little-seen and critically shunned The Bad Batch. But it’ll take a lot more than a polarizing reception to keep the self-styled heiress to the American cinema underground down.
After courting cult fandom with The Bad Batch and the similarly off-beat vampire picture A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Amirpour’s going mainstream for an upcoming feature. Deadline announced today that the director would tackle a remake of the 1993 Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger as her next major effort (after the soon-to-shoot Kate Hudson picture Blood Moon, that is).
The original film cast Sly as a mountaineer who goes head-to-head with a criminal syndicate after they ditch their $100 million nest egg during an emergency crash-landing in the Rockies. He races against them to be the first to find the money, leading to a situation that many not-inaccurately clocked as “Die Hard on a mountain” at the time.
This new take from Amirpour will, in true 2019 fashion, replace Stallone with a female lead. But a big name has already been floated for the cast list, with Amirpour’s Bad Batch muse Jason Momoa “in talks” for a “key cameo.” What that means — the extent to which a cameo can be “key” — is anyone’s guess.
Most intriguing of all might just be the budget; the Deadline item specifies that Amirpour’s production would work from the same $70 million allowance as the original film, though that sum was a bit more money twenty years of inflation ago. Even so, speaking relatively, Amirpour’s last feature shot on a $6 million budget. The death-defying location shooting, potential for massive effects set pieces, and sheer scale will all be new challenges for her.
Better lace up those spiked boots tight and triple-check the carabiners.
Published 9 May 2019
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