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RoboCop statute in Eastern Market (Deadline Detroit photo)
After about 15 years in the making — from a tweet to planning, from execution to installation — the RoboCop statue, modeled after the movie RoboCop, has found a home at 3434 Russell St. in Detroit's Eastern Market.
The 11-foot-tall, 3,500-pound bronze statue is already drawing plenty of attention after being installed on Wednesday. On a cold Thursday afternoon, people were snapping photos in front of it and taking selfies.
The RoboCop science fiction movie premiered in 1987 and featured Detroit as a crime-infested city. Actor Peter Weller played cop Alex Murphy, who was murdered and returned as a cyborg law enforcer to fight crime, thanks to the megacorporation Omni Consumer Products.
As Detroit Free Press columnist Neal Rubin tells it, someone around 2010 tweeted a suggestion to then-Detroit Mayor Dave Bing: “Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky & RoboCop would kick Rocky’s butt. He’s a GREAT ambassador for Detroit." Bing did not bite.
Brandon Walley, a graphic designer and filmmaker, launched a Kickstarter campaign for the statue in February 2011 with some friends from a Detroit arts nonprofit called Imagination Station, Rubin writes. They raised $67,436 in pledges, of which nearly $60,000 was actually donated.
Detroit sculptor Giorgio Gikas finished the statue in 2017.
Rubin writes:
“Meantime, the well-intentioned founders of the project and their eventual sidekicks at Eastern Market found themselves doing battle with the realities of location, legalities and further funding.”
On Wednesday, the installation finally happened.
