Prime Video's Reboot Of '80s Sci-Fi Classic Fills The Void Left By Westworld

Prime Video has scored some of its biggest hits by bringing our favorite sci-fi franchises to the small screen. Amazon has successfully turned the choose-your-own-adventure Fallout video games into a single, cohesive, serialized drama; it’s turned The Boys comics into the defining superhero satire of its generation (and then ran it into the unscorched earth); and it’s giving us the first live-action Blade Runner TV show with the sunshine-noir sequel Blade Runner 2099.

Between the cyberpunk gem The Peripheral and the time-travel gem Paper Girls, Amazon has made a few earnest attempts to break into the kind of elevated, philosophical sci-fi that HBO pioneered with Westworld, and Apple TV has continued with Severance and Pluribus. Fallout was created by Westworld duo Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, but it deals with very different themes.

Fallout touches on corporate greed and mutually assured destruction and post-apocalyptic lawlessness, whereas Westworld was all about artificial intelligence becoming sentient and turning on its nefarious creators. Fallout is a great show, but it doesn’t exactly scratch the Westworld itch. A different sci-fi reboot coming to Prime Video could fill that void instead.

Way back in 2020, Robocop co-creator Ed Neumeier announced that he was working on a prequel TV series following a young Dick Jones and the rise of Omni Consumer Products. In 2024, the show finally started to come together with Peter Ocko as its showrunner and James Wan as its executive producer. Last month, the Robocop series finally found a home when it was officially ordered by Prime — and it could be Amazon’s answer to Westworld.

Robocop Will Explore Similar Themes To Westworld

On the surface, Robocop might look like another schlocky, run-of-the-mill, high-concept ’80s B-movie, full of bloody violence and explosions, but it’s actually a lot smarter than it seems. That was the Paul Verhoeven special: smuggling sharp social commentary through a speculative sci-fi lens. He did the same with Starship Troopers (the ultimate anti-war allegory) and Total Recall (a mind-bending odyssey through Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brainwashed hippocampus).

Robocop uses its premise of a futuristic police force resurrecting a dead officer as a killing machine, and giving him free rein to enact his own brand of justice on the people of Detroit as judge, jury, and executioner, to take a haunting look at a dystopian American police state. It’s an explosive, high-octane satire of the downside of allowing corporations to privatize public services and run the police for profit.

But it’s also a meditation on A.I. and identity. OmniCorp wants to reprogram Alex Murphy’s mind to focus solely on his barbaric police work, but he’s plagued by memories of a family he once loved and a home he once lived in. That’s what Westworld was all about: the robotic cowboys at the robot Wild West theme park became sentient and fought for a better life. Blade Runner deals with the same ethical dilemma, and Amazon is bringing that one to TV, too.

Robocop Is Unlikely To Repeat Westworld's Biggest Mistake

Westworld got off to a promising start with an incredible first season, but it gradually alienated casual viewers as its subsequent seasons got way too complex and mysterious. Hardcore sci-fi fans could follow the lofty, ambitious narrative twists and turns of those later seasons, but more passive fans like myself quickly lost the plot and tuned out.

I can’t imagine that’ll be an issue for Amazon’s Robocop show. Robocop deals with some really heavy subject matter, but the actual plot couldn’t be simpler — the robot cop turns on his makers — so I doubt the TV adaptation will be a Westworld-level brain-scrambler. It will, however, ask a lot of the same questions about the horrors of unchecked capitalism and the destructive whims of the ultra-wealthy.