Harrison Ford’s 1997 film Air Force One was one of those many fun action movies to come out of the 90s. The movie was directed by Wolfgang Peterson, from a script by Andrew Marlowe, and during a recent interview with SyFy, Marlow talked about a possible sequel or reboot saying that it’s something that he’s been approached about.
Ford plays President James Marshall in the movie, who finds himself in a high-stakes battle against a group of terrorists led by Ivan Korshunov, played by Gary Oldman. The story unfolds aboard the iconic presidential aircraft, Air Force One, when it is hijacked by the terrorists while en route to a diplomatic summit in Moscow. President Marshall must use his wits and badassery to thwart the terrorists and save not only his own life but also the lives of his family and the passengers on board.
Marlowe talked about a possible sequel, saying: “Harrison as president goes someplace, he’s on an Air Force carrier, it’s attacked, he’s in the middle of an unstable geopolitical situation. And so, there are things he can and can’t do, because you don’t want to inflame it. He’s got to navigate it and he’s the person at the heart of it. There are many variations on it and with the tuning fork, we didn’t get it to the point where we are all like, ‘Ah, that’s perfect! We’re not repeating the first movie. We’re building on it.'”
As for a reboot, he said: “People have talked about it, people are still talking about it. I think we’re in a period of time when, if you’ve had something that’s extraordinarily successful, people want to see if they can mine that IP. But again, I think our bar is, ‘Are we saying something new? Are we saying something relevant to the culture now?’ We don’t want to do something that’s just exploitative storytelling, we want to do something that feels like it has a purpose in the world.”
He continued, “And when we were doing it, the presidency and that position was not as politically charged as it is today. And so, I think that there are specific challenges about doing it in the contemporary climate that we would have to figure out. But believe me, people keep talking about it.”
There really doesn’t need to be an Air Force One sequel or reboot. That was one of those films that fit right in with the 90s. But, if they did make one, it’d be interesting to see what they would do with it. What kind of story would you want to see with this franchise?
