Today in Terrible Ideas: Robocop Being Rebooted… Again

Back in 2014, MGM and Sony released a remake of Paul Verhoeven's 1987 stone cold masterpiece RoboCop, and surprisingly, people saw through its cheap attempt to sanitize and cash-in on name recognition alone. Granted it wasn't terrible—at least not compared with RoboCop 3—but it wasn't good and frankly didn't need to exist.

Now that we're all four years older and wiser, and the new trend is to give classic films "the sequels they deserved" rather than remaking them outright. This has led MGM to once again attempt to improve upon the utter perfection that is RoboCop with a better sequel than RoboCop 2.

According to Deadline, District 9 director Neill Blomkamp is stepping behind the camera to direct RoboCop Returns, based on a script by original RoboCop scribes Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner, who will also be attached to the film as producers. Neumeier and Miner apparently wrote this script back in the 80s as a planned follow-up to the original film, but it was scrapped in favor of what would become Irvin Kershner's RoboCop 2.

Look, if the dude that made The Empire Strikes Back couldn't deliver a decent sequel to RoboCop, maybe it's time to accept the fact that the film doesn't need a sequel, especially not one that's coming out more than thirty years after the original. I know the hot new thing now is to ignore any previous sequels, as evidenced by the upcoming Halloween, but this seems awfully misguided.

Blomkamp's a talented dude, but he's not Paul Verhoeven, and if you're gonna do this right, you need to get Verhoeven. I acknowledge that this notion can work, as it did with last year's Blade Runner 2049, but Verhoeven's still alive and still making razor sharp flicks like 2016's Elle. I'd feel a whole lot better about this if I knew Verhoeven had passed before they went to Blomkamp, but I doubt that's the case.

What do you guys think? Does RoboCop really need another sequel, even if its purpose is to retcon all prior sequels? Sound off in the comments section below.