Dan Stevens knows exactly which parts of RoboCop cannot be lost.
In his first comments since landing the role, Stevens told ComicBook that Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 original ranks among his favorite films of all time, calling it “maybe one of the first exposures to extreme violence and also satire” for him and his friends growing up.
Preserving those two elements, he said, is what he’s most looking forward to about the show.
The comments came while Stevens was promoting Onslaught, his third film with director Adam Wingard, which A24 releases September 4.
The casting news broke earlier this week, about a month after Amazon officially ordered the eight-episode series from showrunner Peter Ocko and James Wan’s Blumhouse Atomic Monster.
The franchise has lost those elements before
Stevens naming violence and satire is not a throwaway answer. Those are exactly the two things this franchise kept sanding off after 1987.
The kid-friendly animated series arrived just a year after the original. RoboCop 3 dropped to PG-13 in 1993 and remains the low point of the film series.
The 2014 remake made the same ratings call, trading the gore and the bite for a PG-13, and it’s remembered accordingly.
Every version of RoboCop that softened Verhoeven’s edges has fallen short of the one that didn’t, which is a big part of why RoboCop: Rogue City connected by going back to the hard-R tone of the classic films.
Streaming removes the excuse.
A Prime Video series has no ratings-driven box office math to hide behind, so if this show pulls its punches, it’s a choice, not a constraint.
The satire half looks to be in capable hands: Ocko ran Lodge 49, a show built on corporate satire whose shadowy company was literally named Omni, a wink at RoboCop‘s Omni Consumer Products.
Wan previously credited Ocko with a “distinctive vision and bold approach to storytelling” when the series was ordered.
What comes next
Additional casting is still to be announced, with key franchise roles like Murphy’s partner Anne Lewis and OCP’s Old Man presumably up next.
Stevens, meanwhile, is currently shooting Season 2 of Dexter: Resurrection and has Godzilla x Kong: Supernova arriving in 2027.
