THR has a great interview with John Carpenter up on their site, and tucked away neatly in one corner of it is some interesting stuff about a Metal Gear lawsuit that never was.
While discussing an old lawsuit between Canal+ (co-owners of Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York) and Luc Besson ’s 2012 film Lockout (which lifted heavily from EFNY’s plot), Carpenter reveals that the French studio “wanted to also go after the video game Metal Gear Solid, which is kind of a rip-off of Escape From New York, too, but I told them not to do that.”
“I know the director of those games, and he’s a nice guy, or at least he’s nice to me.”
Presumably a lawyer somewhere down the line would also have pointed out that Metal Gear’s Snake is simply a homage to EFNY’s Snake Plissken, and that the convoluted paramilitary storyline of Metal Gear has almost nothing in common with Carpenter’s vision of a dystopian United States.
But hey, Kojima being a nice guy to John Carpenter can help head that problem off at the pass!