Dan Stevens Is Ready for ROBOCOP and Wants to Preserve What Made the Original Great

Dan Stevens is officially stepping into one of sci-fi’s most recognizable suits of armor, and he already knows exactly what he wants to keep intact from the movie that started it all.

After years of talk about another RoboCop reboot, Prime Video finally made things official with a new TV series based on Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi classic.

Unlike the 2014 remake, this version is being developed for television, with Stevens set to play police officer Alex Murphy, who eventually becomes RoboCop.

The original RoboCop happens to be one of Stevens’ favorite movies, and he wants the new series to retain the combination that made Verhoeven’s film so memorable: vicious violence and razor-sharp satire.

While speaking with ComicBook about his upcoming film Onslaught, which hits theaters September 4, Stevens talked about what excites him most about taking on Alex Murphy.

“Oh my god, I mean so many things,” Stevens said. “That original is one of my favorite films of all time. For me and so many of my friends it was such an iconic movie; I think maybe one of the first exposures to extreme violence and also satire. I think that’s what I’m most looking forward to, hopefully preserving those elements.”

The 1987 movie wasn’t simply an ultraviolent action flick about a murdered cop resurrected as a corporate-owned machine.

Verhoeven used the insanity to tear into corporate greed, consumer culture, privatization, media, law enforcement, and the increasingly blurred relationship between people and technology.

It could be hilariously absurd one minute and brutally violent the next, while still finding a surprisingly human story underneath all the bloody carnage.

Those things proved difficult for later RoboCop projects to recreate. The success of the original quickly turned the movie into a franchise, but subsequent sequels and adaptations struggled to match its particular combination of satire and extreme violence.

An animated series arrived just a year after the original film, which naturally meant much of the violence had to be removed. I still love, though, that they took a hard-R movie and turned it into a kids cartoon! That’s so crazy!

Stevens recognizing those qualities is encouraging, especially since the actor has built a career around characters that can shift between charming, strange, funny, intimidating, and completely unhinged. His work certainly shown that he isn’t afraid to get weird with a role.

The series also has Peter Ocko serving as showrunner. Ocko previously worked on Lodge 49, a series with its own satirical streak and, amusingly enough, an antagonistic mystery corporation named “Omni.” That name certainly feels appropriate for someone now entering the world of Omni Consumer Products.

Executive producer James Wan has previously described Ocko as having a “distinctive vision and bold approach to storytelling” for the upcoming series, although specific details about how the team plans to reinterpret RoboCop for television remain under wraps.

Stevens is currently the big casting announcement, but more names should follow as the project moves forward. Major characters such as Murphy’s police partner Anne Lewis and OCP’s powerful chairman, commonly known as “The Old Man,” still need to enter the picture.

There’s plenty we still don’t know about Prime Video’s RoboCop TV series, but I hope it gives us the violence, satire, and corporate lunacy.

I’d buy that for a dollar!