It has been 39 years since an R-rated sci-fi movie satire shocked the world and ended up as one of the best 1980s cult classics. The 1980s were a weird decade in that several great movies were released that didn’t set the world on fire at the time, but ended up being reappraised later and turned into beloved classics. This was especially true in the sci-fi genre. In a decade that gave fans a lovable alien in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and furry little Ewoks in the Star Wars franchise, the sci-fi movies that went darker in tone ended up misunderstood and dismissed by critics. This was true for movies like The Thing, Blade Runner, and the 1987 satire RoboCop.
RoboCop was released 39 years ago, hitting theaters on July 17, 1987. This was one of several sly satires that Paul Verhoeven released over his career, and like most of his more overt satires, the themes went right over many critics’ heads.
Paul Verhoeven has always used his movies to deliver social messages, although in many cases, the critics and mainstream audience can’t see his message through the satire. A perfect example of this is his war movie Starship Troopers. Based on a Robert A. Heinlein novel that was clearly a pro-war, pro-military story, Verhoeven showed how ridiculous war really is in his movie adaptation. He mocked everything about war and skewered the authoritarian military compound, but what happened was critics calling it a pro-military movie and fans missing the entire point that Verhoeven was making fun of it.
The same thing happened with RoboCop. In this 1987 sci-fi classic, a Detroit police officer named Alex Murphy is murdered by a street gang. His body ends up being used to create a new cyborg robot police officer named RoboCop. He is programmed with four directives: serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law, and a classified one that ended up being disallowed from acting against a senior officer of Omni Consumer Products (OCP), the company behind the RoboCop program. These directives end up mashing up against each other, which leads to the climactic ending.
RoboCop was a modest box-office success when it came out, grossing around $53.4 million domestically on a $13.7 million budget. Critics mostly praised the movie, but many of them seemed confused about what the movie was trying to say. There were many critics who didn’t know what genre to slide it into, pointing out the sci-fi, action, thriller, superhero, camp, and even comedy genres that the film straddled. Some critics accurately praised the social satire, but others said it lacked style and came across as sleazy.
However, one thing that stuck with many critics was the violence in the film. Roger Ebert commented that the violence was so excessive that it was deliberately comical. In his review, Ebert wrote, “It is funny in the same way that the assembly line in Chaplin’s Modern Times is funny – because there is something hilarious about logic applied to a situation where it is not relevant.” He also said there were moments that made him laugh, while no one else in the theater did. That was how polarizing RoboCop was when it was released in 1987.
RoboCop did get a lot of attention from genre awards. It was the most-nominated film at the 15th Saturn Awards, receiving awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Director, Best Writing, Best Make-up, and Best Special Effects. The film received three more nominations, including Best Actor (Weller) and Best Actress (Allen). It even received an Oscar, with a Special Achievement for Best Sound Effects Editing, while also earning nominations for Best Film Editing and Best Sound.
The movie was also a massive hit on home video, where it was a massive success story in sales and rentals. It then later received a Criterion Collection release, a very special honor for a movie that was seen as a risky sci-fi action movie when it was released. This has also led the franchise to success in almost every other area of entertainment. The first video game, RoboCop, arrived in 1988 as an arcade game. There were even mashups with RoboCop Versus The Terminator in 1993 for Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and others. The most recent game was RoboCop: Rogue City in 2023 (with RoboCop: Rogue City — Unfinished Business, a standalone expansion released in 2025).
RoboCop also came to comic books. In March 1990, Marvel Comics began publishing an ongoing title by Alan Grant and Lee Sullivan based on the film that ran for 23 issues. Dark Horse Comics acquired the title in 1992 for several miniseries. Avatar Press got the rights in 2003, with Frank Miller, Steven Grant, and Juan Jose Ryp creating the first series. Since then, Dynamite and Boom! Studios have published their own RoboCop stories. There was also a RoboCop movie remake that was nowhere near as subversive as the original.
The biggest reason that RoboCop has been such a long-lasting success isn’t that it is about a robot cop killing people. It is the themes that Paul Verhoeven added to his movie as the social message that he wanted to tell. This was a movie about the corruption of corporate power and how that can lead to the absence of humanity. This, just like Starship Troopers, is an anti-authoritarian message movie that shows that giving this much power to a corporation or a corrupt government can lead to the decimation of society. RoboCop is the hero that the world needed, and he has lived on for the last 39 years as a result.
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