ED-209 malfunctions and brutally kills a volunteer, allowing ambitious junior executive Bob Morton to introduce OCP's chairman ("the Old Man") to his own project: RoboCop.

Murphy and his new partner, Anne Lewis, pursue notorious criminal Clarence Boddicker and his gang: Emil Antonowsky, Leon Nash, Joe Cox, and Steve Minh.

In addition to the main cast, RoboCop features Paul McCrane as Emil Antonowsky, Ray Wise as Leon Nash, Jesse D. Goins as Joe Cox and Calvin Jung as Steve Minh, members of Boddicker's gang.

Not fluent in English, Verhoeven said that the satire did not make sense to him;[10] the scene that attracted his attention was RoboCop returning to Murphy's abandoned home and experiencing memories of his former life.

[12][21] Neumeier and Miner wrote a third draft based on Verhoeven's requests, working through injuries and late nights; the 92-page revision included a subplot about a romantic affair between Murphy and Lewis.

[26] The low salary he commanded was in his favor, as were his good body control from martial-arts training and marathon running and his fan base in the science-fiction genre after his performance in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984).

[25][29][26] Weller spent months working with mime Moni Yakim, developing a fluid movement style with a stiff ending while wearing an American football uniform to approximate the finished costume.

"[10] Neumeier was on set throughout filming and occasionally wrote additional scenes, including a New Year's Eve party after seeing some party-hat props and a news story about the Strategic Defense Initiative platform misfiring.

[69] RoboCop's violent content made it difficult to receive an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which restricted the film to viewers over 17 unless accompanied by an adult.

[10][25] The MPAA also objected to a scene of a mutated Emil being disintegrated by Boddicker's car, but Verhoeven, Davison and Orion refused to remove it because it consistently received the biggest laughs during test screenings.

[87][88] He developed about 50 designs based on feedback from Verhoeven (who pushed for a more machine-like character),[87][89] before settling on a sleek aesthetic inspired by the work of Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama.

The character appeared at a motor-racing event in Florida, a laser show in Boston, a subway in New York City, and children could take their picture with him at the Sherman Oaks Galleria in Los Angeles.

[l] Some publications found Verhoeven's direction smart and darkly comic, offering sharp social satire that The Washington Post suggested would have been just a simple action film in another director's hands.

[139][142] The Washington Post and Roger Ebert praised Weller's performance and his ability to elicit sympathy and convey chivalry and vulnerability while concealed beneath a bulky costume.

[142][144] The Chicago Reader found the violence had a "brooding, agonized quality ... as if Verhoeven were both appalled and fascinated" by it, and The Christian Science Monitor said critical praise for the "nasty" film demonstrated a preference for "style over substance".

The Los Angeles Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer considered RoboCop's victory satisfying because it offered a fable about a decent hero fighting against corruption, villains and the theft of his humanity, with morality and technology on his side.

[134][135][141] The Washington Post agreed that the film's "heart" is the story of Murphy regaining his humanity: "[W]ith all our flesh-and-blood heroes failing us—from brokers to ballplayers—we need a man of mettle, a real straight shooter who doesn't fool around with Phi Beta Kappas and never puts anything up his nose.

[155][156] Rental demand outstripped supply; estimates suggested that there was one VHS copy of a film per 100 households, making it difficult to find new releases such as Dirty Dancing, Predator and Platoon.

The film's poster, painted by Mike Bryan, was reportedly more popular than the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue[119][173] and its novelization, written by Ed Naha, was in its second printing by July.

[13][183] A self-described hippie who grew up during the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, Miner was critical of Ronald Reagan's pro-business policies and believed that Detroit was destroyed by American corporations.

[10][13][65] The Detroit presented in the film is described as beset by rape, crime and "Reaganomics gone awry", where gentrification and unfettered capitalism result in corporations waging war as the police become a profit-driven entity.

[1][10] Brooks Landon describes the film as typical of the cyberpunk genre because it does not treat RoboCop as better or worse than average humans (just different), and asks the audience to consider him a new life form.

[13] Weller described RoboCop as an evolution of strait-laced 1940s heroes such as Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart, who lived honorably; modern audiences now cheer a maimed police officer taking brutal revenge.

[65] In a 2013 interview following Detroit's bankruptcy and the city's labeling as the most dangerous place in the United States, Neumeier spoke about the film's prescience: "We are now living in the world that I was proposing in RoboCop ... how big corporations will take care of us and ... how they won't.

[12] He has said that many robotics labs use a "Robo-" prefix for projects in reference to the film, and he was hired as a United States Air Force consultant for futuristic concepts because of his involvement with RoboCop.

[5] In 2020, the Guardian's Scott Tobias wrote that in hindsight, RoboCop was the beginning of Verhoeven's unofficial science-fiction trilogy about authoritarian governance (followed by Total Recall and Starship Troopers).

[196] Previously typecast as someone who played moral characters, Cox credited RoboCop with changing his image and—with the Beverly Hills Cop films—boosting his film career to make him one of the decade's most iconic villains.

[221] The character was a design inspiration for the Nintendo Power Glove (1989),[222] and appeared in advertisements for KFC in 2019 (again voiced by Weller),[223] and Direct Line in 2020 with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Bumblebee.

[252] Filmmakers have spoken about their appreciation for RoboCop and cited it as an inspiration in their own careers, including Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck,[253] Neill Blomkamp[24] and Leigh Whannell[254] and Ken Russell, who called it the best science fiction film since Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927).

[256] By November 1987, Orion had greenlit the development of a sequel targeting a PG rating, that would allow children to see the film unaccompanied by adults,[257][258][259] and tying into the 12-episode animated series RoboCop, released by Marvel Productions in 1988.