Dan Stevens, who will play Alex Murphy in Prime Video’s forthcoming RoboCop series, says he hopes the adaptation retains the original film’s extreme violence and satire. His comments underline the challenge for the new series: preserving the tone that made the 1987 science-fiction film distinctive while updating the franchise for television.

The eight-episode series is written by Peter Ocko and centres on a major technology conglomerate persuading a city to add a powerful robot to its police force, using the consciousness of the deceased officer Alex Murphy. Peter Weller played Murphy in RoboCop (1987) and RoboCop 2 (1990), followed by Robert Burke in the 1993 third film and Joel Kinnaman in the 2014 remake.