Provocative Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn has been trying to resurrect “Maniac Cop” for roughly 16 years, which is fitting for a franchise built around a murderous policeman who refuses to stay dead. The remake first took shape as a film for John Hyams, then mutated into an HBO series before the network finally read Refn’s scripts and, in his words, “started to have a heart attack.”
Refn eventually put the project back on the shelf. Then, in 2023, the director nearly died… for real. A leaking heart valve caused severe heart failure and left his lungs filling with blood, leading to emergency surgery. Refn has said he was clinically dead for roughly 25 minutes before being revived, an experience that radically changed both his life and his desire to make movies.
He returned to filmmaking with “Her Private Hell” (read our review), his first feature in a decade, and brought “Maniac Cop” back with him. The sleazy grindhouse police nightmare had clearly never left his mind, and while making his new film, Refn realized that America’s current political climate had finally caught up with the project he had been carrying around for years.
In a recent Playlist interview for “Her Private Hell,” Refn said he now plans to shoot “Maniac Cop” in 2027.
“While I was making ‘Her Private Hell,’ I realized what I needed to do next because, obviously, you’ve got a new sheriff in town in America,” Refn said. “I felt, now is the time to make ‘Maniac Cop.’ Before, it wasn’t the time. It wasn’t in my cards. But now it is, so I’ll shoot that next year.”
The current incarnation is expected to begin production in Los Angeles in January 2027. MUBI is fully financing the film, has acquired distribution rights across North America, Latin America, the U.K., Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Benelux, Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand, and plans a wide theatrical release. Casting and plot details remain under wraps.
Refn first began trying to revive the property around 2012. By 2015, he was producing a feature version that Hyams would direct from a screenplay by Ed Brubaker, the acclaimed comics writer behind “Criminal” and Marvel’s Winter Soldier storyline. “Maniac Cop” was their first collaboration; Brubaker later co-created and wrote Refn’s Amazon series “Too Old to Die Young.” The project resurfaced in 2019 as an HBO and Canal+ television series, once again with Hyams involved.
“The only problem was that HBO didn’t know what ‘Maniac Cop’ was until they read the scripts, and then they started to have a heart attack,” Refn told The Playlist with a laugh, suggesting the material was too extreme and brutal for the cable channel.
According to Refn, the material’s more explosive political themes created an impasse with the network, particularly because he intended to direct the series himself.
“Obviously, there was a conflict of interest between us,” he explained. “But I also saw the explosive nature of the themes of the show that I wanted to make because I had to direct it, and that was the deal.”
The split was not especially acrimonious, at least by Refn’s description.
“So we parted ways amicably, I got all my stuff and some dough, and we were all happy,” he continued. “Then I put it on a shelf, went on and died, came back, and did ‘Her Private Hell.’”
The original “Maniac Cop,” a sleazeploitation classic directed by William Lustig from a screenplay by Larry Cohen, was released in 1988 and follows a series of killings committed by a seemingly unstoppable murderer wearing a police uniform. Its transformation of police authority into an immediate horror image has only become more politically charged with time.
Refn had already tied his new version to the present political climate when the MUBI project was announced in May, describing the iconography as something that now provokes “an immediate, uneasy reaction.” The filmmaker’s latest comments make clear that the timing is central to why this incarnation is finally moving ahead.
“Her Private Hell” opens July 24 via Neon. More from The Playlist’s full interview with Refn very soon.
Born in Chile, raised in Canada, now living in Brooklyn, NY, Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2007. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, MuchMusic, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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