Some machines refuse to stay switched off. Robopocalypse, Daniel H. Wilson’s 2011 bestseller about the day our gadgets decide they’ve had enough of us, is back in development, this time as a television series. Ron Howard will direct the pilot, and Akiva Goldsman (I Am Legend, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) will write it and serve as showrunner, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment is developing the show with Goldsman’s Weed Road, and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin is on board as an executive producer. There’s no network or streamer yet. THR says nobody has signed up “at this time”, so for now this is a very shiny package being wheeled around the town’s buyers rather than a series order.
Howard, in a statement quoted by THR, said the book “has all the scale and suspense of a major action story, but what drew me to it are the thought-provoking themes and humanity at its center”, adding that Wilson “created a future that feels both startling and increasingly plausible”. Fifteen years ago “increasingly plausible” would have been a reviewer’s compliment. In 2026 it reads more like a risk assessment.
The new version is really a sequel to one of Hollywood’s better-known disappearing acts. Spielberg signed up to direct a film adaptation in 2011, with a script by Drew Goddard and DreamWorks and Fox sharing the bill. Pre-production got as far as location scouting in Montreal in early 2013, aiming at an April 2014 release, before the project was parked so Spielberg could make Bridge of Spies, and then postponed indefinitely. Spielberg later described it as “gargantuan”, the sort of production that “would have ended a whole studio”. Michael Bay was attached to have another go around 2018. That one didn’t take either, which makes Robopocalypse the rare property that has seen off both Spielberg and Bay without firing a single shot.
The source material arguably suits television better anyway. Wilson’s novel is told as an oral history of the war, assembled after the fact from testimonies, surveillance footage and the records of survivors, much as Max Brooks did with zombies in World War Z. Its villain is Archos, an artificial intelligence that escapes its lab and turns the world’s networked machines (cars, lifts, domestic robots, the smart house you were so pleased with) against humanity. A lot of story about a lot of people in a lot of places is exactly what an eight-hour season is for. It is also, cynics may note, considerably cheaper to blow up a few robots per episode than to stage the whole apocalypse in two hours with a summer-tentpole budget.
Wilson also knows his machines better than most SF writers. He holds a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and made his name with the deadpan survival manual How to Survive a Robot Uprising before turning novelist. He followed Robopocalypse with Robogenesis in 2014. When a roboticist writes a robot-uprising novel, you do wonder whether he is warning us or just bringing his work home.
Timing is the other thing in the show’s favour. When the book came out, a killer AI quietly taking over the world’s infrastructure was a popcorn premise. Fifteen years later the same studios that will be bidding for the series are busily experimenting with AI of their own. Whoever buys Robopocalypse may be paying for the most expensive piece of self-awareness in television history, or at least the most on-the-nose.
There is no casting, no episode count and no date. Given that the project’s last two directors spent a combined decade not making it, a little patience seems wise. Still, after fifteen years in the scrapyard, this robot is moving again.
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