Ed Neumeier, one of the screenwriters of the original 1987 “Robocop” film, tells Moviehole that he’s currently working with MGM on a new “Robocop” prequel series – one that would focus on a younger version of Ronny Cox’s Dick Jones character and the collapse of Detroit into Delta City.
Jones is the sleazy and highly corrupt Senior Vice President of Omni Consumer Products in the crime-ridden hellhole of Delta City (a renamed Detroit) in the film, so the series will focus on the rise of him and the insidious corporation that seems to do pretty much everything bar manufacture consumer products.
Neumeier, who will also produce, tells the outlet he’s working with writers Dave Parkin and Rob Gibbs on the project which “has all the cool stuff about RoboCop except no RoboCop”. That doesn’t mean there’s not much to cover, on the contrary:
“There’s the idea of doing things about business and law enforcement in the city of Detroit a minute-and-a-half in the future, it would be a way to do all sorts of stories about business and tech, Silicon Valley, corporations, snakes in suits, cops, all that. It’s a wonderful rich tapestry.
So we’ve been talking about it and I think we have an interesting story. It’s fun to work with a younger version of the Dick Jones we meet in RoboCop. He’s an actualized corporate predator [in the movie] but nobody necessarily starts out being the bad guy. So it’s going to be about the evolution of Richard Jones to Dick Jones, the story of OCP and how the world moves into the future, how the corporate world behaves.”
The project is separate from “RoboCop Returns,” the film MGM and Orion recently hired Australian filmmaker Abe Forsythe to direct. That film is expected to use some of the sequel script original scribes Neumeier and Michael Miner wrote decades ago and so will ignore the subsequent sequels and 2014 reboot.
At present there’s no formal go-ahead for the series but Neumeier hopes MGM can find the right partners and proceed with a pilot.
