Derek Mears has gotten to play some awesome characters over the course of his career, including Jason Voorhees in the FRIDAY THE 13TH 2009, a Classic Predator in PREDATORS, and the titular character in the recent, short-lived Swamp Thing series. Now Mears has even gotten the chance to play RoboCop.
The Mears version of RoboCop isn't in a movie. Even though Neill Blomkamp recently passed the helm of ROBOCOP RETURNS, a sequel to the first ROBOCOP film, over to LITTLE MONSTERS director Abe Forsythe, it's still not clear when that project is meant to go into production. Instead, RoboCop (the original, not the remake Robo) has made his return in an unexpected place – in a commercial for an insurance company.
In the video embedded below, RoboCop tries to help people but finds that Direct Line insurance has already given them assistance.
Mears makes for a pretty good Robo, and if Peter Weller doesn't want to or can't reprise the role in ROBOCOP RETURNS (he is 72 years old, after all), it looks like Mears could handle it quite well. I don't expect Forsythe to let an insurance commercial do his ROBOCOP RETURNS casting for him, but it wouldn't be a bad idea if he did.