It’s fun following the Hollywood trends, which started with remakes, then reboots, and continued with faux sequels/prequels that remained in the same universe and timeline as the original films. Now, the new craze is alternate timelines. Neill Blomkamp was ahead of the curve with his now-defunct Alien 5, which was to take place following the events of James Cameron’s Aliens. In fact, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s now-filming Halloween ignores all of its predecessors and is a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 classic.
Now, original RoboCop writer Edward Neumeier is developing his own alternate timeline for his 1987 film that took place in a dystopic and crime-ridden Detroit where a terminally wounded cop (played by Peter Weller) returns to the force as a powerful cyborg haunted by submerged memories.
“They have me working on a new one at MGM right now so maybe we’ll get another one out of it,” revealed in an interview at the Barbados Independent Film Festival.
“Well, here’s what I’ll say,” he continued when pressed for more information. “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.”
The problem with José Padilha’s 2014 RoboCop remake was that it was too stylized and futuristic. It was too clean. RoboCop is more Hardware or V/H/S than it’s Blade Runner, and the reason it resonates is that of the choppy, messy, and clunky mechanics of the future. It’ll be interesting to see if MGM allows Neumeier to get back to roots of what made the original films so special.