The Return of RoboCop and Red Dawn

According to The Hollywood Reporter, MGM has picked up its pre-production pace on remakes of ROBOCOP and RED DAWN. The trade is reporting that the studio has talked to a handful of directors including Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain) about it’s re-launch of Robocop which. in my opinion. was one of the great genre films produced in the 80s. Its reputation has been somewhat tarnished with the ill conceived Robocop 2 and the childish and barely releasable part 3. Personally. I see a direct remake a mistake by the studio as the original film in this franchise was a brilliant piece of work by its director Paul Verhoeven and a re-launch of the series should acknowledge its existence.

As for Red Dawn. the studio has signed screen writer Carl Ellsworth (Red Eye) to write and Dan Bradley (2nd unit director of Spiderman 2&3) to direct the film. Red Dawn (released in 1984) has remained a popular genre film over the years as it gets a lot of TV air time on the AMC channel and has been a solid seller among older titles on DVD. While the idea of an unsuspecting full blown foreign invasion of the United States will probably play as far fetched as it did in the original, I’m interested as to how they tackle this property for the 9/11 generation.