It had long been consigned to development hell. But could Darren Aronofsky yet be tempted to reboot the RoboCop franchise? It looks a mighty long shot to us…
There's been a mixed response to the news that Darren Aronofsky is signing up to direct Wolverine 2 now that his potential awards-magnet Black Swan is slowly beginning its roll-out. The bone of contention seems to be thus: that Aronofsky is easily one of the most interesting directors working in American cinema right now, and it seems a shame that we'll lose him for a couple of years to what will effectively be X-Men 6.
However, that does overlook the fact that the director has come close to helming a blockbuster movie before. He developed Batman: Year One for some time, before Warner Bros opted to reboot the Dark Knight's big screen adventures with Christopher Nolan on-board instead. And he was also attached, to some degree at least, to a new take on RoboCop.
We can't begrudge Aronofsky taking a bigger budget blockbuster movie, and the success of Christopher Nolan is arguably the template for what happens when it goes right. Nolan has delivered both interesting blockbuster films, and also, in between his trips to Gotham City, has used the clout they've given him to put The Prestige and Inception together. Is Aronofsky looking to follow a similar path, we wonder?
And if he is, could RoboCop be back on the radar? There's not a frame of the original RoboCop that we'd touch, to be fair (although there are plenty of frames in the sequels that we'd go for), but it had been widely assumed that Aronofsky's attachment to the franchise was long over.
In all truth, it probably still is, given that MGM's well-documented financial woes delayed the project, and also given that his next couple of years will be spent in the company of Hugh Jackman. But Moviehole is suggesting that all isn't quite lost.
It's a long shot, granted, and there seems no fuel to this particular fire from Aronofsky himself, but it's reporting that MGM is still keen to push ahead with a new RoboCop. That bit is easy to believe. Where it gets more testing is when it suggests that someone has spoken to MGM's production department about when a green light for the project might happen, and that the answer is "If we can raise 150 million dollar[s], the movie will happen with Darren Aronofsky on board."
I'd buy that for 150 million dollars? It doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?
Still, we'd suggest that a new RoboCop film will happen in the next five or six years. But we'd also suggest that Darren Aronofsky will not be directing it.
Here's the piece at Moviehole.
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