There's Gonna Be A New 'RoboCop' Show ... Without RoboCop
While RoboCop fans have been eagerly anticipating a new movie that would canonically scrap the two sequels (and presumably the cartoon series in which RoboCop brings peace to the Middle East), that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon. After the crappy 2014 remake, the closest thing we've gotten to a new RoboCop movie in recent years is, sadly, those KFC commercials in which a goateed RoboCop hurls gobs of fried chicken at hooligans and inexplicably threatens to murder innocent families. But now original screenwriter Ed Neumeier has announced that he's developing a new show set in the RoboCop universe all about ... um, this guy?
Yeah, the new show isn't about RoboCop or Anne Lewis or even the dude RoboCop shoots in the balls, but Dick Jones, the Senior Vice President of Omni Consumer Products and the villain of the original film. The series would serve as a prequel to the movie, chronicling this corporate shitheel's early success in the business world. Think Succession but with way more giant murder-bots. Worryingly, Neumeier suggests that we'll be rooting for young Jones because "Nobody necessarily starts out being the bad guy." And if there's one thing America is desperately craving right now, it's stories about how slimy billionaires are secretly pretty cool.
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Perhaps the dumbest part of all of this is that, even if we accept the premise of a prequel series focusing on a RoboCop villain, they didn't even pick the best villain. Clearly, Clarence Boddicker's story would be much more interesting; the enigmatic weirdo played by Kurtwood Smith, who, as comedian Roy Wood Jr. pointed out, impressively assembled Detroit's most racially-diverse evil gang.
But it seems as though RoboCop is taking the Hunger Games route, discarding our hero in favor of the youthful adventures of a creepy douchebag we all hate. Personally, we'd rather see a biopic about the ups and downs of the "I'd buy that for a dollar" guy's career in the entertainment industry.
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Top Image: Orion Pictures
