Nearly 40 years after he first took to the streets, RoboCop still proves to be a compelling idea. Paul Verhoeven’s legendary 1987 satire – charting the literal dehumanisation of Peter Weller’s law enforcer Murphy as he’s mangled into a crime-exploding cyborg – has endured in the culture ever since, with a slew of sequels, some maligned TV adaptations, a kids cartoon (!), and a reboot movie. But his journey isn’t over. No, the brain of RoboCop is being scooped out again and placed into another mechanised body – by which we mean there’s a new adaptation on the way, this time a streaming series with some major players behind it.
The combined powers of Blumhouse and James Wan’s Atomic Monster will present an eight-episode RoboCop series for OmniCorp- sorry, Amazon’s Prime Video streamer (somewhat ironic, given the not-so-subtle anti-capitalist satire of Verhoeven’s film), with Peter Ocko down as its showrunner. Original RoboCop creators Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner are also on board as executive producers, with James Wan as a named producer too.
“I’ve been a massive fan of RoboCop forever, so getting to help bring this world to television is a dream,” Wan says in a press release. “What Paul Verhoeven created in 1987 was decades ahead of its time, and its questions about technology, identity, and who corporations really serve have only grown more urgent.” Wan also celebrated “Peter’s distinctive vision and bold approach to storytelling”, promising a show that will “honour what made the original iconic and highlight its relevancy in this modern, tech-driven world, while building something unmistakably new for a global audience.”
Will a new version of RoboCop find more to say about consumerism and depersonalisation, nearly 40 years on? Will we get a whole episode on the background of Emil, the melting toxic waste guy? And who will play the latest gen of RoboCop? Stay tuned for answers as the show moves towards production.
