Posted in: streaming, TV | Tagged: robocop, Roboforce

RoboForce Creator on Choosing Tubi, Seeking Bigger IPs Like RoboCop

RoboForce creator Brian Volk-Weiss spoke with Bleeding Cool about why he chose Tubi for the animated series and how RoboCop got away.

It's rare to find anyone who can build an empire from childhood memories, especially at the grassroots level, bringing together once long-forgotten IPs, remembered mostly by the biggest die-hard fans, and combining them into their own universe, but Nacelle Company's Brian Volk-Weiss is living that dream as we speak. From bringing back RoboForce from the ashes after Transformers decimated its initial release in the 1980s, he's garnering plenty of childhood favorites like Sectaurs, The Great Garloo, C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa, Biker Mice from Mars, back with far more along the way. Volk-Weiss spoke to Bleeding Cool about why Tubi became the perfect platform for RoboForce, the animated series he's co-producing with Dwayne Johnson's Seven Bucks Productions, and how close he came to acquiring RoboCop and relaunching it.

'RoboForce' Creator Brian Volk-Weiss on Working With Tubi, Netflix, and 'RoboCop' Plans Had He Secured Rights

Bleeding Cool: What made Tubi perfect for a platform for 'RoboForce?'

The two main things. The first is they're everywhere. If you're not going to be on Netflix, Tubi is within reason, other than maybe on Amazon. Tubi is everywhere and they're blowing up now. Currently, the order of streamers by views is YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, Tubi, and if I had to guess, by the end of this quarter, Tubi is going to be ahead of Disney+. They are taking off.

Another major thing I like about them is they're free. Nobody must sit there and mess around with a credit card and all this nonsense. You go and you hit play. I think you've got to put in your age, name, or make up a screen name or something, and boom! You go. The other reason we went with Tubi – we had multiple offers [elsewhere], but as a company, we did our first deal ever with Netflix in 2009. I am sure there's other people who have done that. There might even be people who have done a deal with Netflix before us. I have never met one of those people.

I remember the first time I started working with Netflix and being like, "These people are. Crazy! Oh my God, they're all cowboys and cowgirls! They're badasses and take risks! They're three-dimensional people and real!" Look what happened with Netflix. When I made my deal with Netflix, they were on the verge of going bankrupt, or people thought they were, because they had separated their disks from their streaming. What we ended up doing when we did that deal was we got a front row seat to what everybody else would see about ten years later. I got that same feeling from Tubi, and they have thrown all their marketing support and everything they've been doing for us, and I was right! They were absolutely the right partner.

Are there other IPs you're looking at or expand upon that perhaps, you're circling the wagon on?

Yes, we have three negotiations going on right now. Statistically speaking, one will definitely close, one might close, and one will never close. There are others we are knocking on the door once a month, and trying to get what we're doing at this point, since we've been doing this now for three years. We're now being very selective about what we want to include in the NacelleVerse, but we're also out there looking for our big IP. We came very close to getting RoboCop about four years ago, and we would have gotten it had Amazon not bought MGM, because the rights were expiring due to this not-too-well-known Sonny Bono law.

We negotiated directly with the two creators of RoboCop. We pretty much had a done deal, outbid MGM, and then Amazon bought MGM. Believe it or not…I'm glad you're sitting, because this will BLOW YOUR MIND: Amazon has more money than we do, so we lost 'RoboCop,' but I'm telling you that story to make the point. We are absolutely trying to get a household name brand that will join the NecelleVerse of a 'RoboCop' or bigger nature.

While we're staying on the subject of 'RoboCop,' what would you have wanted to do with it? Did you want to bring back in the live-action original format? Did you want to expand the animation part of it?

What we would have done with it…what's a good example? I'll give you a great example. You know how 'Yellowstone' was supposed to be this show in Montana about a family fighting with another family, and now it's like fucking 80 spin-offs and a thousand different things? That's what I've done, so we would have immediately greenlit a 'RoboCop' movie that pretty much would have used the same script as the first movie, except we would have modernized it.

OCP (the fictional corporation behind the character) probably needs a little bit of updating, yada, yada, yada. We would have had a movie come out and put a TV show into production. The feature film would have acted like a pilot for…I guess a better example would be the pre-Star Wars prequels, and what happened with 'The Clone Wars.' We would make the movie, then the series, which would be live action, and we would have probably done animated as well. We would have had the TV show support the movies, and then the movies support the TV show, and then this probably will not surprise you. We also would have made a shitload of toys.

Would you have kept the original 80s grit R-rating there, or would you have done like PG-13?

Oh, R, R, R on the way to X. That's what I feel is the problem with almost everything. RoboCop after 'RoboCop 2' (1990), and I'm one of the people I'll say publicly, I love 'RoboCop 2'! I know it's not as perfect as the first one, but I still enjoy the second one quite a bit. Listen, man, you either do something or you don't do it. It's when you compromise that it's like…I saw an article about the new CEO of Hooters, who is trying to make it a family-friendly restaurant. Listen! I get it. In theory, that makes a lot of sense. There are a lot more families out there than lonely dudes who want to go see that kind of waitress. I get it, but you're Hooters! If you're going to do that, create a new name and start from scratch. 'RoboCop' is the same thing. It works because of the humor and the gore. The humor doesn't work without the gore, and the gore doesn't work without humor. It would have been absolutely just as violent.

Dwayne Johnson and Dany Garcia co-produced season one of RoboForce for Seven Bucks Productions. The series features the voices of Katherine Norris, Julee Song, Rory McCormick, Chris Coculuzzi, Daniel Nwobi, Heather Jansma, and Dave Beynon. It is available to stream on Tubi.

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