Robocop 3 arrived on home video this week in 1994 – or it may have been April 27th… who the hell knows. It got delayed so often the trade ads were all over the place. But it hit shelves eventually, after a November 1993 theatrical release – which itself was delayed from summer ’92, after Orion filed for bankruptcy in ’91.
Well. At least the movie was worth the wait, right?
The first film was a berserker satire with plenty guns, guns, guns, gore, and Reaganomics run amuck – pretty much a perfect film. The second was mean, messy, and cynical to the point of exhaustion. But by the time Robocop 3 limped into theatres, two years late and slapped with a family-friendly PG-13 rating – it was clear the studio didn’t want another Robocop movie. They wanted Robocop product.
So it had jetpacks, and ninja cyborgs. But no Peter Weller.
What it did have was Fred Dekker.
Dekker was the guy who gave us Night of the Creeps. Who co-wrote The Monster Squad with Shane Black – a box office dud that lived on in the bloodstreams of every horror kid who spent more time in the Fangoria back pages than on the playground. He was smart, sharp, and you could tell he loved the same things we did as a kid.
Robocop 3 should’ve been a bullseye. A semi-soft reboot designed to launch toys, cartoons, comics – something for the T2 generation to rent on repeat. But it got caught in Orion’s financial collapse, and the compromises stacked up fast. What finally hit screens in ’93 was treated like a joke.
The movie bombed. Dekker vanished. And I’m still angry about that. Robocop 3 was a misfire, but the system ate him alive.
It’s easy to mock the PG-13, the delays, the toyetic designs. But some films don’t need to be appreciated for what they did right – they can be appreciated as a strange, compromised slab of ’90s pop art, where a guy in a plastic cyborg suit walks around shooting bad guys. That usually has me at hello.
I was there for The Exterminators. I was down for Cyborg Cop and The Demolitionist. So it took more than fraught expectations to ruin this for me.
Mostly, I just felt bad for Dekker.
Fred Dekker should’ve been another Spielberg. Instead, Robocop 3 became his 1941, and no one gave him his Raiders. But if you squint hard enough, you can still see the movie he meant to make.
And sometimes, just sometimes, when I’m feeling just a little ‘Marvel Action Universe’, this is my go-to robo fix. -Pop
