It looks like the financial woes of the old filmic giant MGM Studios have claimed yet another movie casualty; as the studio, which holds in its back catalogue such titles as Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of OZ, Rocky Balboa, and the Stargate movies, to mention a few, has acquired such a massive amount of debt (to the tune of $3.7 billion) that it has put the future of many of its major projects in jeopardy; the James Bond franchise is already seriously threatened and on indefinite hiatus (with many an internet rumour supposing that, if delays continue, Daniel Craig may not return for Bond 23), The Hobbit has been delayed, given a release date, delayed, and most recently lost its director, and now it seems like MGM’s planned Robocop reboot has landed on the chopping block.
Robocop first entered the public eye with the very successful cult hit movie that was titled after its main character (and opened way back in 1987); a Paul Verhoeven (whose directing credits include Total Recall and Basic Instinct) kids film, with decidedly adult themes, and over-the-top violence, about a futuristic police officer named Alex Murphy (Peter Weller, Prey) who gets brutally murdered, but is then resurrected as a half-man/half-machine policeman named Robocop.
Since then Robocop has had two movie sequels, dozens of comic book adaptations, video games, and a spin-off TV series in ’94, and due to its lasting popularity, was one of the hot properties that MGM was hoping to remake and use as a means of clawing back some of its horrendous debt margin.
Production hadn’t exactly been stagnant either (until the debt crisis really took its toll and halted all major MGM productions), as a script had been written, and The Wrestler’s Darren Aronofsky was attached to direct; that was of course until the movie got cancelled, as it was apparently “one of the first casualties [of the MGM trouble]” according to an inside source.
The same source also believes that Aronofsky has now “lost interest”, and states that “we’re all just going to have to be happy with the three Robocop movies that are already out there”, as all signs point to the remake being well and truly dead.
