This week’s news was relentless: one year after confirming the green light to transform the content of the classic Metropolis into a miniseries, Apple TV officially canceled the project that was about to begin recording. Reason? Strike by writers and costs, an incredible irony for the content and discussion of the work. After all, one of the motivating points for the still-unagreed stoppage is precisely around the use of Artificial Intelligence in scripts.

The project spearheaded by the showrunner of Mr. Robot, Sam Esmail, was under discussion since 2016, but only in 2022 was it made official by the platform. It already had two actresses confirmed in the cast, Lindy Booth and Briana Middleton, and it was in the process of pre-production in Australia, where it would be shot in a few weeks. Lindy would be the heroine Maria and Briana was credited as “Finnie Polito”.

According to the websites, the production was in “limbo” because the eight planned episodes did not have their scripts finalized before the strike and the costs for the special effects would be astronomical, including the construction and maintenance of expansive stages in addition to ultra-specialized labor. According to the Deadline website, just for Metropolis, about 4,000 jobs would be generated and the series was already referred to as “one of the world’s largest ‘virtual production’ infrastructures”. The cancellation generates deep dismay and is worrying because, among platforms and studios, only Apple and Amazon had not yet entered the wave of cancellations and cost cuts.

Metropolis is a pioneering content in several senses: literature, cinema, and social, coming out of the imagination and book by author Thea Von Harbou, who published the story in 1925 and participated in the production of the feature, in 1927, directed by her then-husband, Fritz Lang. The story conceived by Thea, combined with the director’s frighteningly accurate and current look, created a copied and influential work about a futuristic urban dystopia and the social problems of capitalism, mixed with technology and the use of Artificial Intelligence. This was all thought of 98 years ago.

The series would be based on the plot that takes place in the futuristic city that gives title to the work, where the elite has a life of luxury and prosperity at the top at the expense of an oppressed class of workers underground, constantly forced labor with dangerous machines to maintain. everything working. When the son of the most powerful man in Metropolis falls in love with a working woman, Maria, conflict is created. He ends up witnessing the death of several workers in an industrial accident, caused by an android that uses Artificial Intelligence to instigate a bloody revolution.

Sam Esmail has always been a fan of the sci-fi classic and has worked for nearly seven years to update Metropolis for new generations. The future is now uncertain and depends on a social and economic discussion brilliantly portrayed in the original. Particularly I still bet on the project’s ‘return’ when the strike comes to an end (it started in May and there is still no agreement) because it would be even more ironic if an AI managed to overcome the impasses and turn Metropolis into reality. At least on paper…

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