For years, it looked as though 1987’s RoboCop would be getting a direct sequel, based on its screenwriters’ decades-old script. We look at the fate of RoboCop Returns…
It’s almost exactly 10 years to the day since a RoboCop film last appeared in cinemas, with director Jose Padilha’s interesting-but-compromised remake released on the 12th February 2014.
The updated story of a gunned-down cop revived as a cyborg law enforcer made money ($242m at the box office) but not enough, evidently, for its producers to pursue initial plans to make a sequel. Instead, MGM began development on an entirely new direction for the series – RoboCop Returns, which would have ignored both the 2014 reboot and the two 1990s sequels, and served as a direct sequel to the 1987 original.
RoboCop Returns first came to light in July 2018, when Deadline reported that Neill Blomkamp, the writer-director of District 9, Elysium and Chappie, would be shepherding it to the screen.
The most interesting bit of news to emerge from that report, though, was the suggestion that RoboCop Returns would be based, to some degree, on a script written by screenwriters Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner back in the 1980s. Neumeier and Miner were, of course, the writers of the original RoboCop, and it was their humour and ideas – a mix of comic book splatter and satire aimed at the media, corporate power and the US automotive industry – that helped make the film such a classic.
When RoboCop became an unexpected success for production company Orion Pictures in 1987, a sequel was ushered through, with the initial plan being to tone down the violence and make something that could get a PG rating. Neumeier and Miner were therefore hired to write a script, a rough draft of which had already been finished by New Year’s Day 1988.
Due to a series of events we won’t recount here, Neumeier and Miner’s script was never used, and what became RoboCop 2, released in 1990, was credited to comic book writer Frank Miller and The Wild Bunch screenwriter Walon Green. The script was still being tinkered with even as director Irvin Kershner got filming underway, however, and RoboCop himself, Peter Weller, regularly complained that they were making a movie without a proper third act.
Over 30 years since it was last written, though, Neumeier and Miner’s script was plucked back out of the archives, with Terminator: Dark Fate screenwriter Justin Rhodes said to be giving it a rewrite.
So what was it that prompted MGM to think of shooting Neumeier and Miner’s screenplay? Seemingly, Donald Trump’s unexpected election win in 2016. The story went that MGM president Jon Glickman had read the duo’s script, and recalled that one of the key plot details was that Bixby Snyder – the comedian whose catchphrase, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” punctuated the original RoboCop – had been elected president in Neumeier and Miner’s story.
Neumeir got a call from Glickman one day, who asked, “Did you actually predict in your sequel script that a reality star would run for president and win?”
“We had,” Neumeier told Deadline. “So Mike and I wrote a draft and gave one interview in Barbados and I think the only person who read it was Neill Blomkamp, and that set this in motion.”
Interestingly, a version of their script is still floating around online in PDF form, and provides a fascinating insight into what RoboCop 2 might have looked like in the early 1990s, or what RoboCop Returns could look like if it ever happens.
Entitled ‘Robocop II: The Corporate Wars’ it seems loosely inspired by Rip Van Winkle, in that it sees RoboCop, having been gravely injured by heavily-armed robbers in the middle of a bank heist, revived some 25 years in the future.
By this point, Los Angeles is now named MetroPlex3, the inane Bixby Snyder is President, and the United States, on the brink of bankruptcy, is about to be bailed out by an Elon Musk-like trillionaire named Theodore Flicker. The remains of RoboCop are found by two bickering executives, Ed Billings and Mike Montana (who appear to be knowing stand-ins for Neumeier and Miner, given they share the same first names). They take the cyborg’s dormant remains to an archetypal mad scientist named Stanley and his sidekick, Miso, who proceed to revive Robo and make a few tweaks to his broken limbs.
It’s here that it emerges that MetroPlex3 is overseen by an artificially intelligent computer called NeuroBrain, which is imbued with the consciousness of Stanley’s dead wife, Helen. There are also human-like droids everywhere that do menial jobs like drive golf carts and serve up French fries in restaurants – though these have a habit of going awry, leading RoboCop to his first mission, which is to take down a malfunctioning droid in a fast food joint.
RoboCop therefore becomes an armed foot soldier for Billings and Montana, roaming MetroPlex3 and acting as literal judge, jury and executioner. The debt the original RoboCop owed to Judge Dredd was always obvious, but it’s taken even further here, with RoboCop uttering things like, “PlexJury finds you guilty as charged. 2392P is punishable by death,” just before he shoots a criminal.
At one stage, RoboCop even utters a line that’s remarkably close to Dredd’s old “I am the law” catchphrase – “The law is wherever I am…”
As RoboCop marches around MetroPlex3, there are all kinds of other subplots buzzing in the foreground. Billings and Montana are hatching various schemes, first against the city’s chief of security, and later against Flicker himself. There’s an ‘urban terrorist’ named Danson who’s plotting a coup – something Billings and Montana also encourage, and involves holding the city to ransom with a neutron bomb. There’s a psychopathic criminal who busts out of prison just as he’s about to be executed on live TV. There’s a futuristic drug named Smudge – an ink-like substance you squirt into your eye – and an entire underclass of people packed into slums outside the city grounds, an area dubbed the OutPlex.
There’s so much going on that RoboCop himself is rather crowded out by it all, and there’s no sense of a character arc like the one we saw in the 1987 original (it’s telling that his human name, Alex Murphy, is barely uttered). The closest we get to any kind of personality is RoboCop’s virtual love interest, Helen, who doesn’t really figure much in the story until the last few pages. There’s lots of action, though, including soldiers in mechanical armour called KrashSuits and a pair of ED-209-like DeconstructionDroids with scorpion-like tails.
Neumeier and Miner’s RoboCop 2 script would likely have cost an incredible amount of money to produce. The original RoboCop was a fairly low-budget affair ($13.7m), and their idea of a future city would probably have required the kind of money swallowed up by something like Total Recall (which cost somewhere around $70m – a huge sum in 1990).
RoboCop himself is described as being a more agile character, too, with a flamethrower hidden behind one hand and a cannon behind the other; given how limited Peter Weller was in the 1987 version’s suit, we can only wonder how the sequel’s production designers would have made him move as nimbly as he does in the Neumeier-Miner script.
Again, the version of the script circulating online is a rough draft, and it’s possible that its writers polished and revised it before they were removed from the project in March 1988 (they refused to keep working during that year’s writer’s strike, and were therefore fired for being in breach of contract). Given how taken MGM’s boss was by the Bixby Snyder presidency, though, it seems logical that the elements that would carry over into RoboCop Returns would be the cyborg hero’s emergence in a future even more technologically advanced and dystopian than the one he left behind.
Certainly, the ideas Miner described in March 2019 were very different from those in the 1988 script. He talked about a “real body horror idea” about people surgically augmenting their bodies.
“…our villain was a Centaur-like freaky monster with a football helmet with spiraling horns coming out of it and we called him the mule,” Miner said in an interview with HN Entertainment (via Yahoo). “Justin didn’t go in that direction, but he was inspired by our steampunk body horror examples and hopefully, he’ll play that out as it should be.”
Unfortunately, Blomkamp’s involvement in RoboCop Returns didn’t last long. By August 2019, he’d left the project, stating in a tweet (which was later deleted), “Off Robocop. I am shooting new horror/thriller and MGM can’t wait/need to shoot Robocop now. Excited to watch it in theaters with other fans.”
A few months later, Blomkamp’s replacement was announced: Abe Forsythe, the Australian writer and director of, among other things, the 2019 comedy-horror Little Monsters. Forsythe then spent at least a year working on his own version of the script, only for his take on the material to fall apart at some point in 2021.
“I really wish there was a way that my version of RoboCop could be made,” Forsythe said in an October 2023 interview with UPI. “Unfortunately, there is an element in the script which will stop it from ever seeing the light of day.”
Forsythe added that his RoboCop Returns would have had Peter Weller return as RoboCop, and that he’d spent time working with Ed Neumeier on the script. “I have to be careful of what I say and how I say it,” he added. “My version can never, ever be made.”
Nor, it seems, will RoboCop Returns in general ever be made, at least in the form imagined by Blomkamp or Forsythe. MGM was acquired by Amazon in 2023, which means the corporate giant now owns the rights to RoboCop. There are reportedly plans for a new RoboCop TV series and film – but there are no signs that either of those projects will be based on Neumeier and Miner’s script.
Cinema’s most famous cyborg law enforcer will return – but at present, it isn’t clear whether we’ll ever see Bixby Snyder become US President.
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