Prime Video's Upcoming Sci-Fi Thriller Will Make The Boys Look Tame If They Get It Right

Published Nov 9, 2026, 9:00 AM EST

Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.

RoboCop is one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s every bit the schlocky, salacious, high-octane sci-fi action thriller promised by the title and poster, but it’s also a much deeper examination of capitalism and authoritarianism and the dangers of privatizing public services. It imagines futuristic Detroit as a crime-ridden police state where an evil corporation is free to resurrect a dying police officer as a ruthless robotic killing machine, and the taxpayer will foot the bill for RoboCop to act as judge, jury, and executioner to a poverty-stricken population. The film goes even deeper than that, too, as Alex Murphy’s dormant humanity starts to seep through his programming, and his identity is called into question.

While it worked beautifully in movie form, the premise of RoboCop is tailor-made for television. It has all the pieces of a futuristic police procedural show: a struggling police force in a dystopian metropolis; a cybernetic antihero torn between his own human nature and the will of the corporation that controls him.

So far, there have been four TV adaptations of RoboCop. A year after the first movie came out, it was followed by an animated series. Then, in 1994, there was a live-action series. From 1998 to 1999, there was another animated series called RoboCop: Alpha Commando, and in 2001, there was a live-action miniseries called RoboCop: Prime Directives. Now, Amazon is hoping that fifth time’s the charm, as it’s developing yet another RoboCop TV show for Prime Video.

Veteran TV writer Peter Ocko will serve as the showrunner, The Conjuring’s James Wan is an executive producer, and none other than Dan Stevens has been cast as Alex Murphy, and the streamer that gave us the gonzo gore of The Boys and Invincible is signing the checks. I’m cautiously optimistic, but this RoboCop series is looking very promising.

RoboCop's Themes Have Only Gotten More Relevant

RoboCop’s themes of police brutality, government overreach, and the corporatization of America’s public services were all prevalent when the movie came out in 1987, on the tail end of the Reagan administration. But those themes have only gotten more and more relevant in the decades since. If anything, we’ve already arrived at the dystopia that Paul Verhoeven depicted in RoboCop. If you’ve been paying attention to Elon Musk’s meddling in the U.S. government, then OCP’s antics in RoboCop don’t seem like fiction anymore.

Cyberpunk has been having a moment recently, especially on television. There have been underrated gems like Altered Carbon and The Peripheral, franchise spinoffs like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and the new Ghost in the Shell, and groundbreaking originals like Love, Death, and Robots. Amazon’s RoboCop show is arriving at the perfect time to cash in on that trend, but it has to commit a lot more than the last reboot did.

The 2014 RoboCop movie was a surprisingly solid sci-fi actioner, with an agreeable pace and a handful of thrilling action sequences, but it turned Murphy into a more conventional superhero by allowing him to show his face and reunite with his family, and it removed all the anti-corporate, anti-capitalist satire that made RoboCop stand out from the crowd. The Prime Video series needs to go full RoboCop: his face is obscured by the helmet, his family is a distant memory, and he’s far from a conventional superhero.

Ironically, Amazon’s involvement gives me a lot of faith in this reboot. Amazon is one of the evil corporations that RoboCop is satirizing with Omni Consumer Products, but Prime Video is the home of The Boys, a show that turned the Batcave into a sex dungeon, turned a giant penis into a superpower, and made the “Thanus” fan theory a gruesome reality. If Amazon’s RoboCop show really leans into the grimness and goriness of Verhoeven’s original vision, then it’ll make The Boys look tame.