What do you do when you have a shiny new box of vintage toys to play with? You start playing with those damn things, especially if they can make you billions of dollars. That’s what Amazon is reportedly doing as it looks to capitalize on its acquisition of MGM last year. Per Deadline, Amazon is reportedly looking to relaunch and/or reboot around a dozen of MGM’s successful franchises, including RoboCop, Stargate, Legally Blonde, Fame, Barbershop, The Magnificent Seven, Pink Panther, and The Thomas Crown Affair. Just how it’ll go about this varies by project — movie or TV or both — but it means fans of each property should probably start getting excited but also brace themselves for disappointment when half of the projects never come to fruition.
It seems that it’s not just Amazon who is excited about getting these IPs back up and running, as the studio has been contacted by multiple A-list creatives to work on some of these projects, according to Deadline. That makes sense given MGM’s historical import to the film industry and the myriad of IPs that talented filmmakers probably fell in love with as children and now see an opportunity to actually work on. Who these A-listers are isn’t clear, but just running through the possible sci-fi savants that could make RoboCop truly good again is exciting.
RoboCop appears to be something that Amazon wants to turn into a larger franchise, with both a TV show and a movie in the works. The TV show may reportedly land first, followed by a motion picture. Much the same kind of effort would go into Stargate and Legally Blonde, the former of which already had a sprawling collection of TV and movies. Legally Blonde has had a third movie in the works since the last film came out, but an Amazon TV show would definitely be a new take on the series. Meanwhile, Pink Panther would seemingly move away from its live-action roots and become an animated feature film, though it’s unclear if that would star the cartoon Pink Panther or an animated Inspector Clouseau.
Fame, Barbershop, and The Magnificent Seven are all said to have TV series in the works, and The Thomas Crown Affair would get yet another movie adaptation. In ranging from RoboCop to Legally Blonde, it’s a crap ton of franchises to reboot and some of them may never see the light of day, but Amazon has a big lift if it plans to do them right. MGM has been struggling for decades to make RoboCop a thing again and couldn’t, even though 2014’s RoboCop remake was truly underrated. We’ll see if the big money, A-list talent, and desperate desire for more franchises for Amazon Prime can pull all these franchises (and more with a Creed universe coming) back to life.
In the meantime, there’s that new RoboCop video game.
