Fans were understandably a bit nervous when it was first announced in 2015 that Dwayne Johnson was coming on to produce and star in a remake of Big Trouble in Little China.

John Carpenter’s 1986 original is iconic and let’s face facts, Kurt Russell is really the one and only Jack Burton. (That said, we think Wyatt Russell could actually do a pretty good job.) Carpenter’s movie is a multi-genre mystical-monster-action-adventure-ghost story-kung fu-comedy that quickly became a cult classic much like his other films, Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, Dark Star, They Live and Escape From New York. Hey, even Memoirs of an Invisible Man has its moments.

In an interview with Collider, Hiram Garcia, president of production at Seven Bucks Productions (which was founded by co-CEOs Johnson and Dany Garcia) and one of the producers on Big Trouble in Little China, revealed that the plan now is not to remake Carpenter’s film, but to create a continuation of that story:

“There’s a lot of things going on with [Big Trouble in Little China]. We are in the process of developing that, and let me tell you, the idea is not to actually remake Big Trouble in Little China. You can’t remake a classic like that, so what we’re planning to do is we’re going to continue the story. We’re going to continue the universe of Big Trouble in Little China. Everything that happened in the original exists and is standalone and I think there’s only one person that could ever play Jack Burton, so Dwayne would never try and play that character. So we are just having a lot of fun. We’re actually in a really great space with the story that we’ve cracked. But yeah, no remake. It is a continuation, and we are deep into development on that as well, and I think you’ll start hearing some things about that probably soon.”

This is certainly an interesting development and probably a wise decision, as Garcia says, there’s no replacing Kurt Russell’s Jack Burton. As Collider points out, the question then becomes how closely connected will this new film be to the original, and would Kurt Russell then potentially be open to reprising his role as Jack Burton? And who would Johnson be playing, if not Jack? There are a lot of questions and obviously this film is still in development so plenty could change, but this is an encouraging update on an intriguing project.

Dwayne Johnson seems to be a workaholic with projects lined up for some time, so we might still have to wait a while before this happens.

And if you want an idea of just what a bloody nice bloke Johnson is, here he on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert recently.

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