Okay, I realize, the bloom is probably off the rose when it comes to Samuel-L-Jackson-has-been-cast-in-something news. The guy would probably emcee your circumcision-ban pancake luncheon at the local Elks Lodge, as long as you offered free food and one of those neck pillows to nap on. I think if he stops working for five minutes, he sinks to the bottom of the pool like a shark. But to his credit, when the guy shows up to work, he works. His latest assignment? Playing a media mogul opposite Joel Kinnaman (The Killing, which I’m being told is a show) in the upcoming Robocop remake from Elite Squad director Jose Padilha.

Jackson will play Pat Novak, a charismatic media mogul and a powerful force in the Robocop world. Gary Oldman has already been cast as Robocop’s scientist-creator. [THR]

How do you know which newspaper is his? It’s the one that says “bad motherf*cker.” To recap, this is what we know about the plot so far:

“‘RoboCop’ the first movie was fantastic,” he told us. “But even if there was no movie, the concept of ‘RoboCop’ is brilliant, first because it lends itself to a lot of social criticism, but also because it poses a question, ‘When do you lose you humanity?’ The way it does that is by replacing body parts with machine parts, and that’s very smart because guess what? It’s going to happen!”
“I have my take on it,” he continued, “And I can tell you this: In the first ‘RoboCop’ when Alex Murphy is shot, gunned down, then you see some hospitals and stuff and then you cut to him as RoboCop. My movie is between those two cuts. How do you make RoboCop? How do you slowly bring a guy to be a robot? How do you actually take humanity out of someone and how do you program a brain, so to speak, and how does that affect an individual?” [originalpost]

The way I was interpreting that before, was basically that it was an origin story, and origin stories tend to be kind of sucky, especially when it’s a character with whom we’re already familiar. I get that Robocop’s a cyborg. I kinda just wanna watch him shoot drug dealers in the face. But now that I think about it, seeing that all the big actors are being cast as the societal players who create Robocop, I wouldn’t be surprised if Padilha was making a movie more about the intertwining societal factors that end up creating Robocop than Robocop himself, since that’s kind of what the Elite Squad movies were about. I just hope they don’t forget the face shooting. Robocop was one of the most casually gory movies of the 80s, when almost every movie was casually gory. “What’s that? That scientist? Oh yeah, ED-209 shot him 1200 times in the chest with a .50 cal. Forget about him, we’re onto something else now.”

(I felt like I needed to use this gif for something).