It was hinted at in the trades a few weeks ago, and now it's official: Darrren Aronofsky will be directing the Robocop franchise reboot. The director of Pi and Requiem for a Dream is probably literally the last person anyone would have imagined taking over the series, but then again, we were probably saying the same thing in 2004 about the guy who made Memento directing the next Batman movie.

David Self has also been hired as a writer, and his resume isn't half-bad either-- he wrote the Sam Mendes Depression drama Road to Perdition and the Cuban missile crisis story 13 Days. It seems that MGM really has taken a page from the Batman playbook and hired people with strong credits outside the sci-fi genre, with a hope the results will be half as successful as The Dark Knight.

There really seems to be only two ways this can go. Either Aronofsky makes a visionary version of Robocop that manages to truly reboot the franchise, or he turns in something baffling and incoherent, more along the lines of The Fountain. Yes, I know, The Fountain has its supporters, but imagine if it had been Robocop instead of Hugh Jackman floating in that big space sphere.