South African-Canadian director Neill Blomkamp arrived with a bang in 2009 thanks to District 9, an urgent sci-fi fable that used modern fears of extraterrestrial invaders to tell an old-as-time story of racism and segregation. Blomkamp's interest in wryly satirical socioeconomic sci-fi continued through the big-budget ecocide parable Elysium (2013) and the altogether more anarchically scrappy Chappie (2015) in which a sentient armoured police robot is led into a life of crime. On the surface, this "based on a true story" account of video gamer turned race car driver Jann Mardenborough may seem like a left turn for a film-maker whose career has been built on adventurous fantasy. But if the story of a Darlington-born son of a former professional footballer parlaying video-gaming skills into international racetrack success is not the stuff of fantasy, then frankly what is? While the narrative roots may be "real", at heart this is essentially The Last Starfighter with fast cars standing in for spaceships.

MGM wants to revive the franchise with the appropriately-titled RoboCop Returns, which will apparently directly follow the 1987 original film -- and ignore the 2014 reboot. Returns will be based on an old spec script that the first film's writers Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner wrote shortly after the original's release. Due to the 1988 writer's strike, that screenplay wasn't used and the studio brought in a young Frank Miller of comics fame to craft a new one. But the delay also means the next RoboCop will be directed by someone who grew up with the original. "What I connected to as a kid has evolved over time," Blomkamp told Deadline. "At first, the consumerism, materialism and Reaganomics, that '80s theme of America on steroids, came through most strongly.

Neill Blomkamp has a question: "If you could break apart films and treat them a little bit more like software, what would that look like?" Whether it's blindly following Amazon Instant recommendations or waiting for a film to hit Netflix instead of buying it, video streaming has slowly ushered in a new cinematic landscape; the way we consume movies has changed drastically. Yet despite the impact of the internet on movie-watching, filmmakers' haven't truly changed their creative process. Cult sci-fi director Blomkamp wants to do exactly that. After District 9, Elysium and Chappie, the director set up Oats Studio, which has just released three short films -- Firebase, Rakku and Zygote (collectively titled Volume 1).

After taking a lengthy absence from sci-fi, South African film director Neill Blomkamp has decided to pit the human race against extraterrestrial forces once again. Created by his new science fiction studio, Oats Studios, his latest project is a short film called Volume 1 -- and surprisingly, it could make its debut on PC gaming platform, Steam. With Hollywood currently afflicted by franchise fever, Blomkamp's latest project aims to let viewers test out an experimental series of entirely new sci-fi movie concepts over the internet. If I sold experimental short films on @steam_games as tests for potential full feature films, would people watch them?

"Chappie," the highest-grossing movie in America last weekend, is, to put it mildly, not a great film; the critics have given it a twenty-nine on Rotten Tomatoes, and it is nowhere near as original as "District 9," an earlier effort by the director, Neill Blomkamp. "Chappie" does not have the philosophical depth of "The Matrix" or the remade "Battlestar Galactica" series. Nor does it have the visual panache of "Interstellar" or "2001." From its opening scene, the film comes across as little more than a warmed-over "RoboCop" remake, relocated to Johannesburg. There's an evil company man, droids that menace the population, and a whole lot of blood, shooting, and broken glass.