Earlier this week Hugh Laurie walked away from playing the main villain in MGM’s RoboCop remake and a purported friend of director José Padilha claimed the director likened working on the film as being in hell. This all comes just a month before the film starts filming for a planned release date of August 9th, 2013. Now MGM is releasing news to mitigate both of these discouraging news items. Michael Keaton will be playing the “cold, sarcastic CEO of Omni Corporation”, the role vacated by Hugh Laurie. (YES, PLEASE.) They also released a quote from director José Padilha which makes him sound far less angry than rumored:
“Michael is the final addition to the amazing cast we have assembled for this film, and it is so great to have the last puzzle piece in place. It is thrilling that everything has come together to bring this innovative new vision of RoboCop to life. We’ve got a great script, a great cast, some killer ED-209s, and I can’t wait to get Alex Murphy back on the streets.” [THR]
So, yeah, they’re trying to put a stop to those rumors about the director of the Elite Squad movies not being allowed to do his awesome thing with RoboCop. Then again, if studios want to stop every rumor by casting Michael Keaton in something, we’re cool with that. And Batman agrees…