It wasn’t all that long ago when Hollywood’s leading studios became fixated on remaking the sci-fi classics of yesteryear.
Take RoboCop, as an example. Two years after Len Wiseman’s middling modernization of Total Recall – ironically one of the more forgettable redos in recent memory – and director José Padilha named Joel Kinnaman as Detroit’s cyborg law enforcer. And though the reboot was propped up by a stellar supporting cast, which included Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson, Abbie Cornish and Jackie Earle Haley, the RoboCop of 2014 struggled to leave a lasting impression on its audience.
Fast forward to now, and it seems there’s a brand new model of OmniCorp’s enforcer being built in the bowels of MGM. At least, that’s according to original RoboCop screenwriter Ed Neumeier, who hinted to Zeitgeist Entertainment Magazine (via ComicBook.com) that a new movie is indeed on the cards.
I had seen early screenings and people laughed at it so I thought: ‘Oh it might be successful’ and it was more successful than anybody really knew it would be. I didn’t expect to be talking about it thirty years later. It was kind of the start of my career and later we did Starship Troopers – which was an enormous movie that took forever. I think all of that came out of that and it’s nice that people are still interested in RoboCop and they have me working on a new one at MGM right now so maybe we’ll get another one out of it.
Neumeier was wary of divulging too much, as the project is seemingly in the very early stages of development. Still, he hopes to revisit the “old RoboCop” that helped define a subgenre back in 1987.
Well, here’s what I’ll say. We’re not supposed to say too much. There’s been a bunch of other RoboCop movies and there was recently a remake and I would say this would be kind of going back to the old RoboCop we all love and starting there and going forward. So it’s a continuation really of the first movie. In my mind. So it’s a little bit more of the old school thing.
Much like Skynet (Terminator), it seems as though we haven’t seen the last of OmniCorp and we’ll be keeping you right up-to-date on RoboCop as this tentative project begins to fall into place.