Amazon, the megacorporation that most closely resembles RoboCop’s Omni Consumer Product (OCP), is reportedly closer than ever to dismembering a besieged officer and reassembling him as an agent of state violence. Per The Hollywood Reporter, a RoboCop television series is closer than ever to boot up on Amazon's Prime Video.
As strange as it was for Amazon to produce a Lord Of The Rings series about how industrialization drained nature of its beauty and resources and doomed us to hundreds of years of misery under the dominion of one powerful CEO, RoboCop is equally ironic, due to the similarities between Amazon's market dominance and OCP's. Nevertheless, The Hollywood Reporter says that James Wan’s Atomic Monster will produce the series about an all-powerful megacorporation that seemingly owns everything to the detriment of society, privatizing the Detroit police department and exploiting the city for profit. The series has a showrunner, too: Peter Ocko, who previously ran the gone-too-soon Lodge 49.
Of course, this is nothing new. We’ve all enjoyed a bit of gallows humor as science fiction universes become a reality, with James Cameron joining the board of Skynet and Netflix and Mr. Beast holding their respective Squid Games to predictable results. But it’s important to acknowledge the irony in all this, at least for our sanity, because if any American conglomerate resembles Omni Consumer Product, it’s Amazon.
RoboCop has a robust history of television appearances and selling his image to make a buck. One of his most recent screen appearances was as Colonel Sanders for a series of KFC ads. RoboCop doesn’t even eat KFC—well, except the mashed potatoes (He doesn’t do solids, just baby food). But there’s even precedent for that. Like many stars of the ’80s and ’90s, RoboCop has done plenty of overseas ads, particularly when work dried up stateside, where he hocked consumer electronics, instant noodles, and, yup, fried chicken. On American television, he's wrestled on WCW television and even engaged with Reagan’s disastrous war on drugs in an ad for the Boys and Girls Club. That spot was released around the time of RoboCop 2, a movie about a 12-year-old drug dealer who dies holding RoboCop's hand.
If Omni Consumer Products makes this, it would be the former Alex Murphy’s third crack at a television series. Previously, Robocop starred in a 1988 animated series, a 1994 live-action series, and a 2001 live-action series, RoboCop: Prime Directive. We’d buy this new one for a dollar or maybe even the $14.99 a month.
