**Update: **Though most reports had listed him as on board Variety's Jeff Sneider brings word that Laurie never made a final deal for the movie and is officially off. So now the revoot is looking for a new boss at Omni Corp.
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He’s ditched the cane and doesn’t have to maintain a near-constant level of scruffy chin stubble, but while Hugh Laurie is no longer playing House he has no plans to get back to bumbling do-gooders just yet. According to Variety, he’s in talks to join the Robocop reboot as the villain of the piece.
The casting for Sony / MGM’s new take on Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic is really shaping up in interesting ways. We already have Joel Kinnaman as Alex Murphy, the cop brutally gunned down and reborn as the cyborg lawman. Gary Oldman is playing a scientist named Norton who helps rebuild Murphy, with Samuel L Jackson taking the role of a powerful, uber-patriotic media mogul. And most recently, Abbie Cornish was offered the part of Murphy’s conflicted wife, struggling with the fact that she’s only about 80% a widow.
Assuming he makes a deal, Laurie will be the moneygrubbing head of Omni Corp (we’re hoping they maintain the Omni Consumer Products name for nostalgia’s sake), the company that creates Robocop to boost their profit margin rather than because of any real worries about crime.
Josh Zetumer wrote the most recent draft of the script, and Jose Padilha is set to start shooting this summer. Laurie will next be seen on the big screen in novel adaptation Mr Pip.