There is a giant maze of odd circumstances when it comes to re-making, re-imagining, sequelizing or prequelizing a beloved property. You get into situations where you’re making a “prequel” to a movie while sharing the same name as said movie (see: The Thing). You also fall into a weird zone where you have to keep enough of the DNA of a project to earn the name while making enough of it different to accommodate for new fans (see: every reboot ever).

Then, you have the strange personnel situation where you’re remaking a fan-favorite film, but your lead actor from years past is both 1) still alive and 2) too old to reprise the character. So what do you do? Do you re-cast some poor schlub into a role he can never own? Do you scrap the character entirely and raise eyebrows?

According to Bruce Campbell, it’s the latter. Shock Til You Drop was keen enough to find some tweets from Campbell responding to the Ash Question looming over The Evil Dead remake. “No Ash character currently,” was the straightforward message. It still seems to leave the door open for Ash to walk through, but as of now, it sounds like the production team is attempting to remake a movie without its main character. It’s just one of those weird choices that must be made when walking the tightrope of remakes, but they’re damned if they do or don’t. There is no right answer here, but for now, it looks like they’ve at least chosen.