You should always be careful what rumors you choose to repeat, because especially in this day and age, a rumor can go pretty far before it’s debunked.
We just did a report on fake death reports on Twitter, and about a week after our report another fake death rumor got out, this time about Usher, who is in fact alive and well.
You also have to remember that in Hollywood a tiny bit of information can get blown out of proportion in a hurry.
I once read a story in the Hollywood Reporter that Oliver Stone was being looked at to direct a Superman reboot, but he told me he was only in a meeting for ten minutes and that was that.
Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, the weird biopic screenwriters who gave us Ed Wood and Man on the Moon, were once toying with the idea of making a biopic of the Village People, but it never got passed the outline stage. Still, as they joked to me, the next day you open Entertainment Weekly and they grafted Edward Norton’s head on the construction worker’s body.
So that being said, with a Robocop reboot now up and running, we do know for a fact that Joel Kinnaman, who’s from the show The Killing, is going to play the title role, but both Moviefone and Slashfilm have also reported that Edward Norton and Sean Penn may be up for roles as well.
This claim comes from The Tracking Board, which reports Norton may play a character who creates Robocop like the Frankenstein monster, and Sean Penn may play a right-wing reporter, which, as Movieline notes, would indeed be an interesting role.
Penn was also rumored years back to play the Joker in The Dark Knight, but unlike Johnny Depp, who found a way to do blockbusters in his own uniquely weird way, it’s doubtful Penn would star in a commercial enterprise like a Batman film. Then again, he did guest star on Friends, so who knows? Norton, as we know, is also a closet comic geek, hence him doing the second Hulk movie, and maybe he’ll want to go back in the genre world again with Robocop, if these rumors have any weight to them.
Also don’t forget it was rumored that Russell Crowe was going to play Robocop, and via Twitter that rumor was shut down in a hurry by Crowe himself ( as noted above, Joel Kinnaman will be playing the cyborg this time around). Of course, when general casting is coming together, all kinds of names will get thrown around, so who will ultimately star in the new Robocop is anyone’s guess at this point.
Interesting rumors abound on this one so far, and whether they’ll amount to anything, or they’re the rantings of some chucklehead online, we’ll find out soon enough.
