Those of us who already miss House are getting some good news; Hugh Laurie is negotiating to be the main bad guy in the upcoming reboot of 1987's Robocop.
If these talks are successful, Laurie will be playing the cruel CEO overlord of Omnicorp, the very company that made Robocop as well as other heavy security automatons.
The new Robocop is set to be directed by Jose Padilha, who, well, apparently has done a bunch of documentaries that I've never seen. Joel Kinnaman from The Killing has signed up to be Robocop himself, and Gary Oldman will be the technical scientist behind Robocop's creation. Samuel L. Jackson has also been enlisted for the project and will likely play a character very similar to Samuel L. Jackson.
I don't quite know how I feel about this remake yet, but I will say this: Hugh Laurie is awesome. Hugh Laurie is the guy who should have played Sherlock Holmes in Guy Ritchie's tediously awful Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. While the character Laurie may play in Robocop is certainly going to be quite different from either House or Holmes, it is true that Laurie is a charismatic and intense individual and his involvement can only bring good things to this film. I'm looking forward to seeing him be bad.
Robocop is tentatively scheduled to hit theaters on August 9, 2013.
Jose Padilha did Elite Squad 1 and 2, which ranks as the highest grossing films of Brazil, so umm "just documentaries?". As for the subject matter of them, they're overly violent, rigidly militaristic, and politically charged, which is roughly what RoboCop was.
As for not knowing how to feel about it, so does everyone else, but if Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson, Abbie Cornish, and now Hugh Laurie sign up for it, the script has to be pretty solid, especially when it's reworked by a guy who just recently sold a script for 3 million...yes 3 MILLION DOLLARS(James Vanderbilt). Look, we all know remakes are the norm in Hollywood, and honestly the need for a RoboCop remake wasn't high on everyone's list but in terms of the relevance of RoboCop it seems that the things that it preached about in the 80's are all the more realistic now, except for maybe autonomous robots and cyborgs that vengefully hunt down their killers at a cocaine factory.