Why "Robopocalypse" will never be turned into a movie.

[DetlefK]

"Robopocalypse" is a great novel with a stupid name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robopocalypse

The year is 2040 or something like that. Robots are everywhere: intelligent household appliances, robotic assistants, bus-drivers, garbage-men, war-robots... Most of the heavy manual labor has been outsourced to robots.

A self-aware, hyper-intelligent AI escapes from a laboratory, hacks all these robots and wages war against humanity. The novel delves into multiple guerilla-wars humanity fights against their robotic overlords all over the planet.

Pretty similar to "Terminator", with one crucial difference:
In the end, the heroes find out that the AI never wanted to wipe out humanity. It wants to save humanity!
It has reduced Earth's population via genocide, but it also has cleaned up the pollution. It's robotic workers have created perfect little habitats where humans can live in harmony with the environment.

The AI has wiped out a good part of mankind to save the rest from extinction.



All in all, it's a fantastic novel, with a dozen protagonists, human, cyborg and robotic, of all ages, from all walks of life and from all over the planet.





Steven Spielberg has been trying for a few years to turn this into a movie. Most recently, Michael Bay is in play. (Dear God. Please not him.)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1541155/

I guess, it will never be made:
The actual threat of a collapse of human civilization via global-warming is just too real. It's not a fantastic what-if scenario. It's a real-world threat we are preparing for right now.

The novel accidently proposes that our real-world problem would be solved via an authoritarian dictator doing what nobody else has the guts to do.

And the worst part is, that the world actually gets saved by the genocidal dictator before the rebels overthrow him.

With the current trend of authoritarianism being on the rise world-wide, I guess this sci-fi movie would play too close to home to be enjoyable.