The city of Detroit has a new public artwork, one that memorializes the lead character in a cult classic film set in the city—nearly four decades after the film was released and some 15 years after the statue was first proposed. The bronze statue of RoboCop measures over 11 feet high and weighs in at some 3,500 pounds.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, the ultra-violent satire RoboCop (1987) stars Peter Weller as police officer Alex Murphy, who, in a near-future, crime-ridden Motor City, is killed by a criminal gang. He is then revived by sinister megacorporation Omni Consumer Products as a crime-fighting cyborg and unwitting ambassador for its plan to privatize the police force. As he struggles to regain his memory, RoboCop attempts to avenge his own death.
Filmmaker Ken Russell has called RoboCop the greatest science-fiction film since Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis. It was followed up with not only two sequels but also not one but two reboots, one from 2014 and one in the works with Amazon MGM Studios, along with video games, comic books, and other tributes.
The campaign to erect a monument to RoboCop started in 2010, when a Twitter user tagged the mayor, Dave Bing, in a post suggesting the statue be created, saying it could rival Philadelphia’s incredibly popular Rocky statue, which stands at the top of the steps outside the Philadelphia Art Museum. “There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop,” replied the mayor. “Thank you for the suggestion.”
Undaunted, filmmaker Brandon Walley and Jerry Paffendorf, co-founder and CEO of Loveland Technologies, launched a Kickstarter in 2012, which ultimately exceeded its $50,000 goal to raise some $67,436. Detroit sculptor Giorgio Gikas of Detroit’s Venus Bronze Works was commissioned to create the piece, which he finished in 2017.
Then began the long road to actually installing the statute. That involved legal issues with MGM, production delays, and a cancer scare that hit the owner of Venus Bronze Works, Walley told Michigan Live. The statue was first planned to stand outside the Michigan Science Center, but the institution nixed the plans in 2021. Three years ago, Free Age film production company co-owner Jim Toscano bought a building in the open-air Eastern Market shopping area, near downtown. When the Kickstarter creators contacted him asking if he could host the statue, he told the Guardian, he thought the proposal was “too unusual, too unique, too cool not to do.”
