In 1987 Paul Verhoeven released one of the most awesomely violent movies ever made, so violent in fact that it initially received and ‘X Rating’ for it’s graphic nature. It told the story of Detroit cop Alex Murphy being brutally murdered by Red Foreman, before OCP (the company that owned the police) stole his body and using state of the art 80s technology, brought Murphy back to life. Kinda. Robocop was born, more machine than man, at least early on. The movie was incredibly dark as some of Murphy’s memories surfaced and Robocop was forced to deal with the fact that he was once a man with a family and he struggled with his own existence. He did not however let this struggle interfere too much with the downpour of justice he rained onto New Detroit.
In the years to follow Robocop inspired 2 horrible sequels and a slew of crappy TV episodes. In addition though, he did also star in some pretty legit comics and video games. Then a couple of years back rumors surfaced that Darren Aronofsky, who has a penchant for making some pretty dark shit, was tapped to helm a series reboot and bring the iconic 80s hero back to the spotlight. Well delay after delay, including the production of Black Swan, for which he would receive an Oscar nomination, eventually took him out of the running and it was believed that the project was dead.
So while in ‘New Movie Limbo’, the old tin can cop went and got himself nominated to into statue-hood. What started as a joke on Twitter, directed at Detroit Mayor (and NBA Hall of Famer) Dave Bing was a suggestion to build a statue of Robocop downtown to bring in some tourism. Mayor Bing quickly shot this down, and by simply acknowledging it, the interwebs took it and ran. Internet geeks everywhere started pledging money towards the erection of the statue, but it was one geek in particular, Pete Hottelet, threw in $25,000. Who is Pete Hottelet you might ask. Well he is the owner of OCP, his company, named after the corrupt company that ran New Detroit in the movies, makes movie related memorabilia. His donation, combined with the rest of the internet patrons resulted in $67,436 being raised through Kickstarter. That statue is currently in the production stages.
While we’re waiting to see the monument built, interest in the movie spiked back up. This time with Brazilian director José Padilha (Elite Squad) helming the project, and our favorite fictional Cyborg cop is set to be played by The Killing star Joel Kinnaman (below).
Well that had been the extent of what we’d heard for a while. Until just the other day when it was announced that Gary Oldman would also be joining the cast…
Oldman will be playing a new character named Norton, “the scientist who creates RoboCop and finds himself torn between the ideals of the machine trying to rediscover its humanity and the callous needs of a corporation.”
Gary Oldman is fricking awesome. I’m pretty excited for this movie, which is believed to start shooting something this fall, possibly in Toronto. I was really hoping they’d shoot it here in Detroit. I have to say if this time around, it’s set somewhere other than Detroit, I’ll be upset. Anyway, Oldman makes everything better, so that good.
Ok, that’s all I got.
Grizzly Bomb 