As well as being inspired by comic books and his personal experience with corporate culture, Neumeier was influenced to kill off his main character early on by the psychological horror film "Psycho" (1960), whose heroine was killed in the first act. Neumeier wanted to satirize 1980s business culture, noting the increasing aggression of American financial services in response to growing Japanese influence and that a popular book on Wall Street was "The Book of Five Rings", a 17th-century text discussing how to kill more effectively. He also believed that Detroit's declining automobile industry was due to increased bureaucracy. ED-209's malfunction in the OCP boardroom was based on Neumeier's office daydreams about a robot bursting into a meeting and killing everyone. Miner described the film as "comic relief for a cynical time" during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, when economist "Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys ransacked the world, enabled by Reagan and the Central Intelligence Agency. So when you have this cop who works for a corporation that insists 'I own you,' and he still does the right thing—that's the core of the film." The in-film media breaks were Neumeier's and Miner's idea. A spec script was completed by December 1984.