Every RoboCop Film & TV Show, In Order
It has just been revealed that Dan Stevens has signed on to play Alex Murphy in a new live-action TV show remake of RoboCop – and it’s already in production at Amazon Studios.
This makes Stevens — the charismatic English star of Beauty and the Beast, The Guest and the new action movie Onslaught — only the third actor to put on the titanium and Kevlar suit since Peter Weller immortalised the role in Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 original.
Over the last 40 years, the character has been brought back to screens in all shapes and sizes, including an animated TV show and an enormously popular video game in the 1980s. More recent efforts to relaunch Alex Murphy have failed in capturing Verhoeven’s satirical flair, so all sci-fi loving eyes will be trained on Stevens’ show whenever it lands in the next year or so.
In the list below, you’ll find every screen incarnation of Murphy’s no-nonsense cyborg cop so far — which we have gone to the trouble of arranging by order of release.
We'll start where it all began: Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, a smart, stylish and brilliantly violent 1987 action movie that really hasn't aged a day .
The movie — which introduces our hero and sees him attempt to take down the crime boss Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) — was a major hit thanks to the shiny suit, the slick cinematography, and Peter Weller’s monotone charm in the lead role, but there was a lot more going on under its Detroit steel exterior than critics at the time gave it credit for.
It remains a stone cold classic.
The 1987 original was such an instant success that an animated series followed almost right away — although the 12-episode show, in which guns are replaced by lasers, offers a much more kid-friendly version of the character and story.
RoboCop: The Animated Series only ran for one season, but it added to the character’s iconography and worked as a supplement to the beat 'em up video game — which, in the UK, was the highest selling game of the 1980s. If you’re looking for some goofy and nostalgic Saturday morning cartoon fun, it still delivers.
After releasing a movie, show and a computer game in a little over a year, a sequel was never going to be far behind, and even if Paul Verhoeven was too busy making Total Recall to return, the brand new team for RoboCop 2 — spearheaded by Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner and the comic book legend Frank Miller — were mostly up to the task.
The second feature in the Peter Weller trilogy sees RoboCop attempt to crack down on a new drug that’s flooding Detroit, only to discover a wider conspiracy to wipe out the city altogether. The movie frankly doesn’t have the edge of its predecessor and it didn't come close to matching the takings of other major sequels that year, like Back to the Future 3 and Die Hard 2, but it does enough to be considered a worthwhile sequel and any Weller-starring movie should be a must-see for RoboFans.
The same can maybe not be said about the third instalment. If RoboCop 2 replaced the team while attempting to keep the original’s satirical spirit alive, the third movie leaned too far into the humour and all that Jesus iconography stuff and ended up fully jumping the shark.
Of course, it didn’t help that Weller left the franchise and was replaced by Robert John Burke, but director Fred Dekker’s attempts to turn Murphy into an even cuddlier version of Arnie’s T-800 from Terminator 2 fully backfired.
If you’re a completist, it is still an interesting curiosity.
A year after the critical and commercial disappointment of RoboCop 3, a Canadian company that’d apparently bought the rights to make a fourth movie thought better of it and made a terrible live-action series instead.
Of course, they chose not to follow the blueprint of the first two movies but to make another kid-friendly version that nobody really wanted. It ran for just one season with Richard Eden in the title role. Like RoboCop 3, this one is for the most dedicated fans only.
In the late ‘90s, Murphy returned to the small screen in animated form in RoboCop: Alpha Commando, a series that’s reminiscent of other ‘90s cartoons from that time, like X-Men and Mummies Alive!
Alpha Commando is not essential or canon in any way, but if there are some younger viewers in the audience it will probably go down pretty well. The series notably gives Murphy a bunch of new gizmos, making him closer in style to the likes of Inspector Gadget than the character in the Verhoeven classic.
Still unsatisfied by the various ways they’d flogged the dead horse in the previous five years, Orion Pictures decided to try something new again with RoboCop: Prime Directives, a four-episode mini series that returned the cyborg policeman franchise to its gritty, violent roots.
The show was released in 2001 and, if you can get your hands on it, you can certainly see the influence of movies like The Matrix on its darker aesthetics. The story picks up ten years after the first film and takes no heed of events in the second and third movies, so if you’re looking for a breath of fresh air after all that messing around, you could do far worse than Prime Directives.
It was never a question of if Hollywood would decide to remake RoboCop one day, but rather when they’d decide to do it. The answer ended up being 2014, under the stewardship of José Padilha, a Brazilian director who broke out with Elite Squad in 2007 — a gritty, gripping movie about a police force tasked with brutally cracking down on crime in the Rio favelas.
On paper, this RoboCop sounded like a slam dunk, especially with the original creator, Edward Neumeier, coming back on board as a screenwriter, but the resulting movie ended up taking itself a bit too seriously — with almost none of shiny steel and subversive fun that Neumeier first brought to the character. Still, it’s a slick looking sci-fi action movie and Joel Kinnaman does a fine job as Murphy. Let’s just hope the new one remembers what made it fun to begin with.
It’s still early in the day with the upcoming live-action reboot, but at the rate things seem to be moving it hopefully won’t be too long before we get to see it. When Amazon bought MGM in 2022, the RoboCop IP was immediately flagged as a priority, and with Peter Ocko (Moonhaven) now on board as showrunner and Dan Stevens confirmed to star, it certainly seems to be coming together nicely.
In terms of story, it’s looking like a straight up reboot that will show us Murph’s transformation into RoboCop over an eight-episode arc. Fans looking to get a taste of Stevens in android mode can see him play a robot charmer in Marie Kreutzer’s delightful 2021 rom-com I’m Your Man.
