Ana Lily Amirpour is remaking Cliffhanger with… | Little White Lies

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Ana Lily Amir­pour is remak­ing Cliffhang­er with Jason Momoa

09 May 2019

Words by Charles Bramesco

A man in a green jacket climbing a rocky mountain slope.
A man in a green jacket climbing a rocky mountain slope.
He’ll play sec­ond banana to a female lead this update of the 1993 Sylvester Stal­lone vehicle.

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.

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