- Murphy, it’s you! As an 11-foot-tall statue!
“Dead or alive, you are coming with me.” With that phrase, the cyborg law enforcer RoboCop blasted his way onto the silver screen and into general pop culture in 1987.
It’d probably be an exaggeration to call RoboCop the most famous Detroit resident of all time. However, the dystopian science-fiction vision of the city certainly did a lot to put Detroit in the limelight at a time when automotive production was crashing.
Now, Detroit finally has a statue to commemorate its fictional hero.
A huge sculpture of RoboCop (as portrayed by Peter Weller in the 1987 movie) was installed in Detroir on December 4. Towering at 11 feet tall and weighing more than 2.5 tons, the bronze copper stands guard in front of the Free Age film production studio at 2934 Russell Street in Eastern Market.
The statue now joins other famous pop culture-inspired sculptures around the country, like Rocky Balboa in Philadelphia or New York’s Sewer Gator. However, it was by no means given that RoboCop would ever get his statue.
After all, the project took 15 years to complete.
Why did it take so long to give a beloved cybernetic policeman a statue? Here’s the convoluted story behind Detroit’s RoboCop statue.
Successful Fundraiser
The year was 2010, and David Bing was the mayor of Detroit. One day, an anonymous Twitter (now, X) user made a post tagging Bing, saying that the city should erect a statue for RoboCop.
In the post, the person stated the movie character would make for a “great ambassador for Detroit,” much in the same way the aforementioned Rocky statue is for Philadelphia. They asked the mayor if there were any plans to erect such a statue.
Bing responded with a blunt “no.”
As luck would have it, filmmakers Brandon Walley and Jerry Paffendorf — the co-founder and CEO of now-defunct Loveland Technologies, respectively — came upon the messages. They took a look at each other and asked, “Well, why not?”
The duo felt RoboCop deserved a statue. Funny enough, their company’s entire business was focused on arranging crowdfunding campaigns, so they decided to put their expertise to use.
Walley and Paffendorf launched a Kickstarter campaign, asking Detroit residents (and anyone else wanting to pitch in) to fund the statue. Obviously, they weren’t the only ones who wanted to celebrate RoboCop, as the kickstarter was a huge success.
Altogether, they raised $67,346 — plenty for a statue.
Well, that part of the project sure went swimmingly. The rest of it can’t be that hard either, right?
Wrong.
Sculpting is Hard
Delays in the statue project began almost as soon as Walley and Paffendorf had raised the money. They picked local Detroit sculptor Giorgio Gikas, part of Venus Bronze Works, to create the sculpture.
However, constructing a huge cyborg statue turned out to be much more difficult than they had expected.
“We had to get the exact model made. That model had to be blown up to over a 10-foot mold. That happened in Vancouver, and Idaho. That took years,” Walley explained to MLive.
Once they finally had their mold, work still couldn’t begin. Gikas contacted Walley and Paffendorf, telling them that he had gotten seriously ill.
“The owner of Venus Bronze Works went through a cancer scare. That was two more years,” said Walley.
Additionally, the trio building the statue had to go through some design negotiations. For instance, although RoboCop pumps out hundreds of rounds of lead through his Auto 9 automatic handgun in the movie, it was decided that his statue would not carry a weapon.
According to Walley, they made to call to increase the likelihoods of finding a place to display the statue. They figured authorities might be more receptive to a “friendly neighborhood RoboCop” who wasn’t packing heat.
In 2017, the bronze RoboCop sculpture was finally completed.
Rolls of Red Tape
After Gikas finished the statue, though, it went straight into storage. For the next several years, it would sit more or less abandoned in a storage unit with nowhere to go.
After all, as we mentioned, you need a place to put the statue. As it turned out, although the thing was already made, not every landowner in Detroit was keen on having a huge RoboCop stand on their property.
Finding an appropriate spot took quite some time. “We have a location where we are intending it to go up, but we aren’t revealing that yet because not everything is signed and secured,” Ryan Dinkgrave, senior grants manager for Detroit’s Eastern Market, told MLive as recently as 2023.
Once they confirmed that they could put the statue in front of Free Age Studios, Walley and Paffendorf then needed to give it a foundation. The two-ton sculpture needed some serious groundwork to keep it upright, and that naturally cost a lot more money.
And then there were the intellectual property right. The RoboCop movie was made and published by the MGM film studio, so they held the rights to it — but MGM got purchased by Amazon in 2022, so the rights went to them.
Walley and Paffendorf had been in contact with Amazon MGM from the beginning, but now they needed a proper contract. Those negotiations added more time to the already infinitely delayed schedule.
‘I Love It’
Now, however, RoboCop’s statue finally stand in Eastern Market. It has received a warm welcome, both from the public and the film studio on whose property it’s located on.
“I love it,” said Jim Toscano, owner of Free Age. “It looks great, it’s super impressive, and it has already brought a lot of nice people around.”
Although the sculpture is now in place, it hasn’t been officially dedicated yet. That’s been mostly due to the timing of the installation — the workers putting it up labored in darkness, wind, and snow.
That’s not the kind of weather you want to have an unveiling ceremony in. However, once winter is over, Walley says there will be a proper celebration to dedicate the statue to the legacy of RoboCop.
He also added that he will invite Peter Weller to see his (heavily masked) likeness in bronze.