MGM has chosen Brazilian director Jose Padilha to direct a remake of the 1987 action movie Robocop. The movie represents the reconstituted MGM’s first attempt at creating an action movie franchise. Darren (The Black Swan) Aronofsky had been attached to the project, but dropped out when MGM couldn’t get its financial act together.

 

Now that MGM, which was the dominant Hollywood studio in the 1930s and 1940s, is back on its financial feet again, it plans to remake Paul Verhoeven’s near future science fiction movie about a police officer who was brutally murdered and then brought back to life as a superhuman cyborg known as Robocop.

 

Padilha represents a very interesting choice by the studio. Although he is not well known in the U.S., Deadline reports that his crime dramas Elite Squad and Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within have done very well in South America. The first Elite Squad movie won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007, and Elite Squad 2 earned over $60 million in Brazil in 2010, which is more than Avatar or Alice in Wonderland.

 

In the wake of the popular 1987 Robocop film, Marvel published a Robocop comic book series that lasted for 23 issues, and Dark Horse followed with four Robocop miniseries. Frank Miller wrote the Robocop vs. the Terminator  miniseries for Dark Horse and Miller also penned the original story for the Robocop 2 movie and both the story and screenplay for Robocop 3. Avatar Press then acquired the rights to Robocop and published nine issues between 2003 and 2006.