It’s been a year since we heard about any new RoboCop projects. An announced sequel, RoboCop Returns, lost director Neill Blomkamp last August and there hasn’t been much in the way of updates since then. When RoboCop co-creator Ed Neumeier spoke to Moviehole this week he didn’t have any news to report on the sequel — but he did reveal that he’s also working on a sort of prequel TV series set in the universe of RoboCop. He said it “has all the cool stuff about RoboCop except no RoboCop.”

Instead, the show would focus on the young version of Dick Jones, the villain of the original 1987 RoboCop played by Ronny Cox. That Dick Jones is the senior vice president of Omni Consumer Products; the show would explore how he wound up there. More, from Neumeier’s interview:

It’s fun to work with a younger version of the Dick Jones we meet in RoboCop. He’s an actualised corporate predator [in the move] but nobody necessarily starts out being the bad guy. So it’s going to be about the evolution of Richard Jones to Dick Jones, the story of OCP and how the world moves into the future, how the corporate world behaves.

RoboCop series without RoboCop is the kind of galaxy brain take that feels all-too-common in 2020. That said, the world of RoboCop and OCP could make for a pretty entertaining Mad Men-in-the-future style corporate drama. Let’s see if it goes anywhere.

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