After years of build-up and speculation, it now appears that we can finally put this whole RoboCop remake business behind us. It wasn’t a terrible movie in the end, but audience scrutiny – combined with competition from a blockbuster family film and at least one better-than-average Valentine’s Day release – pretty much conspired to make Jose Padilha’s “re-imagining” of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 classic a box office disappointment.
But how bad was the damage anyway? Could RoboCop be rebuilt? Is there anything we can take away from this whole debacle that Hollywood can learn from, or anyone else for that matter? The important thing, for the sake of the art form if not the stockholders, is whether we can move forward wiser than we were when the saga of this remake began.
So here are The 5 Things We Learned from the RoboCop remake, good and bad, about audiences, studios, film critics and at least one prominent news organization. And what lies in the future for RoboCop? Maybe there’s something to learn about that too…
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
RoboCop: 5 Things We Learned
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Don't Remake a Classic
Hollywood loves remaking movies that audiences remember, since it does half their marketing for them, but when the original is considered as classic as RoboCop this approach can - and did - backfire completely. Many in the target demographic stayed away on sheer principle, and some critics who admire the original were extra harsh on the remake because, good or bad, it didn't live up to source material.
In contrast, About Last Night remade a movie that audiences aren't still talking about today, and made significantly more money on the opening weekend: $27 million to RoboCop's $21.5 million. Audience expectation is a powerful thing, which brings us to our second lesson...
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Lower Expectations Yield Better Reviews
The fact that RoboCop was at least arguably a bad idea, and that the trailers looked lame as hell, lowered expectations and led to some better than expected reviews. (io9 even declared it "one of the better science-ficton movies of the year so far," although they neglected to mention that it's pretty much the first.) The same thing happened with The LEGO Movie, which nobody expected much from, but was actually pretty clever, leading some critics to go completely nuts and declare it a masterpiece.
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Fox News Protests the Wrong Movies
Speaking of The LEGO Movie, Fox News hates it because it portrays a capitalist as the bad guy. They seemed to have missed the fact that the movie is as capitalist as it gets, hiding behind a thin veneer of playful satire so audiences will forget that it's just an enormous advertisement for how awesome a capitalist corporation's products are. RoboCop, on the other hand, mercilessly portrays a Fox News-like punditry program, hosted by Samuel L. Jackson, as a hopelessly corrupt tool of capitalist greed, and paints those regimes themselves as insidiously evil. Fox News doesn't seem to care that much about RoboCop though, perhaps because...
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Nobody Sees Action Movies on Valetine's Day
RoboCop is the second attempt by a major studio in a row to release a major action movie as Valentine's Day counterprogramming, and its second major failure. Last year A Good Day to Die Hard opened on February 14 and went on to earn only $67 million domestically, the lowest gross of any film in the franchise. This year RoboCop came in third at the box office, behind a family movie and a romantic comedy, and that's even if you factor in the extra two days it had to rake in the cash (it opened on Wednesday). That being said...
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The Odds of a Franchise are 50/50
RoboCop isn't blowing anyone's minds, financially, but despite its disappointing domestic grosses the international numbers are at least encouraging. The remake has already made $96 million against its $100 million budget so far, and if the mixed-positive word of mouth is any indication, it will probably do very well on home video. MGM wanted a big franchise, and they may still end up with one. Maybe. It's not a guarantee, but the story of this remake hasn't ended. Yet.
