Netflix Sets a Third ‘The Getaway’ Remake With Barantini

Netflix has greenlit a third screen version of The Getaway, handing the hard-boiled 1958 crime novel to Adolescence director Philip Barantini and screenwriter Peter Craig. The remake, first reported by trade outlet The Hollywood Reporter on May 19, arrives with no cast and no release date attached, yet it already carries the most awarded television director of the past year and a writer with three box-office hits to his name.

The story has reached the screen twice already, once as a Steve McQueen hit and once as a panned Nineties remake. This time the draw sits behind the camera rather than in front of it.

Netflix Hands a 54-Year-Old Heist Story to Its Hottest Director

The film teams two collaborators who already share a workload. Barantini directs from a script by Craig, whose recent credits run from the Ben Affleck thriller The Town to Matt Reeves’ The Batman, with an Oscar nomination for Top Gun: Maverick along the way. Craig produces through Night Owl Stories with his partner Bryan Unkeless, while Andrew Mittman produces for the banner 1.21. Barantini and Samantha Beddoe produce for It’s All Made Up, with Kai Dolbashian of 1.21 serving as an executive producer (EP, the credit for financiers and senior creative overseers) alongside Night Owl’s Rey Reyes and Gregory Cohen.

Netflix has not set a production start, and the streamer has stayed quiet on who might play the leads. The report framed the project as in development, the earliest formal stage, which means casting, budget and a calendar slot are all still open questions.

The bones of the story are pulpy and durable. Doc McCoy, denied parole, cuts a deal with a corrupt Texas operator named Jack Benyon: spring me, and I will rob a bank for you. The heist works, the partners double-cross him, and Doc and his wife Carol run for the Mexican border with the loot and half of Texas chasing them.

The Adolescence Director Trades Oners for a Texas Chase

Barantini is the reason this remake reads as a coup rather than a routine library refresh. His Netflix limited series Adolescence, shot so that each episode plays as one continuous take, swept the limited series’ 2025 Emmy results, winning Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series and a directing trophy for the man at the helm.

He is not planning to repeat the gimmick everywhere. Asked about his coming films, he played down the single-take signature.

I don’t want to do it all the time.

Barantini told Deadline in December, explaining why projects such as Enola Holmes 3 would drop the format. A cross-country chase would be an odd fit for a single unbroken shot anyway. The director is busy on other fronts, currently in production on the hostage drama mini-series Rabbit Rabbit with Adam Driver and Regina Hall, which reunites him with Craig. His near-term slate stacks up fast:

• Enola Holmes 3, the third Millie Bobby Brown mystery for Netflix
• Rabbit Rabbit, the Adam Driver and Regina Hall hostage thriller
• The Alchemist, the long-developing adaptation of Paulo Coelho’s novel he has been linked to
• Hell Jumper, a feature based on the 2024 documentary of the same name

Two Star Couples, Two Very Different Results

Here is the catch buried in the pitch: the same plot has produced one classic and one punchline. Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 version, scripted by a young Walter Hill, was a commercial smash, grossing more than $36 million and ranking among the year’s ten biggest releases. Critics have stayed kind; the film holds an 84% score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes (RT).

The 1994 do-over went the other way. Roger Donaldson directed, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger starred, and the result drew a 33% RT score, a Razzie nomination for Basinger and a soft theatrical run that only recovered later on home video. Both films cast real-life couples; only one turned that off-screen chemistry into a hit.

The Bleak Ending Jim Thompson Wrote That Nobody Filmed

Both screen versions share a quiet omission: neither kept the ending Jim Thompson actually wrote. The pulp novelist, prized today for his ice-cold noir, sends Doc and Carol across the border into El Rey, a grotesque criminal refuge where their stolen money buys a few months of paranoid luxury before the place devours them. It is a descent into hell dressed up as a safe house.

Peckinpah and Hill swapped that nihilism for a getaway that holds, sending McQueen and MacGraw off in a truck toward a hopeful horizon. Donaldson’s version kept the upbeat exit too. The American Film Institute’s record of the original documents how the production reshaped Thompson’s downbeat source into star-driven escapism, right down to the romance that spilled off the page and into the tabloids when McQueen and MacGraw became a couple during the shoot.

That gap matters for the new film. A director drawn to bleak, claustrophobic realism now holds a property whose darkest material has never been touched. Whether he reaches for Thompson’s grim finish or the crowd-pleasing one is the first creative question worth asking.

Why Netflix Keeps Reaching Into the Vault

Netflix did not pick this title in a vacuum. The streamer has spent the past two years mining recognizable properties, betting that a known name cuts through a crowded menu faster than an original concept ever could.

The recent track record is mixed, and a few reference points sit close to this project:

• a fresh take on The Thomas Crown Affair, with Aubrey Plaza joining Michael B. Jordan, keeping the heist-classic revival trend alive
• Disney’s reported $170 million loss on its Snow White remake, a reminder that nostalgia and backlash often travel together
• the Extraction franchise heading into a third installment, proof Netflix will pour money into action when a brand performs

The lesson from those bets is that a famous title guarantees attention, not affection. Remaking a beloved film is rarely a sure thing, and the 1994 Getaway is itself a case study in how a competent retread can still land with a thud.

The director does change the math, though. The Emmy run gave Netflix its most credible prestige filmmaker in years, and the company has been eager to keep him close; the platform’s own 2025 Emmy winners roundup logged the show among its biggest awards-season performers. Tying that name to a vault title is exactly the kind of move a streamer makes when it wants a remake taken seriously.

What Decides Whether the Third Getaway Sticks

So the new Getaway becomes a clean test of one idea: that a director and a writer, rather than a marquee couple, can carry a story that twice rose or fell on movie-star chemistry. The bet is on craft over star wattage. Peckinpah had McQueen at his peak; Donaldson had a tabloid-famous pairing; Barantini has a screenplay, a reputation and, for now, an empty cast list.

If the script honors the pulp and the new film brings the tension he found in a single Sheffield kitchen to a Texas highway, Netflix has a heist picture that justifies the dust-off. If it settles for the polished, redemptive version the 1994 movie already tried, the streamer will have proved only that a great title can be remade a third time, not that it should be.