Amazon close to making a new RoboCop series
By Dan Selcke
The original RoboCop movie, directed by Paul Verhoeven in 1987, is about a super-powerful corporation called Omni Consumer Product (OCP) in charge of privitizing the police force in Detroit, to disastrous results. It's an acidic takedown of pro-corporate Reagan-era policies, together with lots of the exaggerated violence and winking crudeness that Verhoeven is known for.
Since then, RoboCop has become something of a corporate playing piece itself, with two sequels, a 2014 remake I'd completely forgotten about starring Joel Kinnaman as the titular felled police officer resurrected as robotic law enforcer, and four different TV series (two live-action, two animated) coming out over the subsequent 30+ years. And let's not forget RoboCop hawking KFC, instant noodles, and wrestling in the WCW. Whoever controls the rights isn't that picky about what happens with the character.
Those people are at it again with a new TV series with Peter Ocko — who worked on the charming AMC series Lodge 49 — as showrunner. The Hollywood Reporter has it that the show is inching closer to a greenlight, although it hasn't crossed the threshold yet. If it has a showrunner attached, we could be looking at an official announcement soon.
Is Amazon the best company to take on this story about capitalism run amok? It's certainly one of the most ironic. Amazon has had mixed success with sci-fi series. It canceled The Peripheral, produced by the folks behind HBO's Westworld, after one season, but had much more luck with Fallout, based on the hugely successful video games. RoboCop certainly has more name recognition than The Peripheral, which was based on a 2014 book written by sci-fi icon William Gibson. But we're still a long ways out from the peak of RoboCop's influence. Will a new show be able to revive it? Stay tuned.
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h/t The A.V. Club