Why it’s taking so long to display Detroit’s humongous bronze RoboCop statue

DETROIT - It’s real and it’s spectacular. Detroit’s massive, bronze RoboCop statue was constructed years ago and is just waiting to protect and serve. Just why is it taking so long to display the statue which has been more than a decade in the making?

And when we say more than a decade, we’re talking 13 years and counting. That’s when someone posted on Twitter asking Detroit’s Mayor at the time, Dave Bing, why Detroit didn’t have a RoboCop statue when Philadelphia had one of Rocky. The Tweet said a RoboCop statue would be a “great ambassador for Detroit.”

Mayor Bing said there were no plans for one. That’s when filmmaker Brandon Walley and Jerry Paffendorf, co-founder and CEO of Loveland Technologies, took action and started a Kickstarter campaign which raised more than $67,000.

Fast-forward to now and the statue, which was constructed by Venus Bronze Works, is currently in storage at Detroit’s historic Eastern Market, which has plans to publicly display the 11 foot tall, 2 and a half ton statue on its property. There’s just some legal issues to finalize with the movie studio.

“We have a location where we are intending it to go up, but we aren’t revealing that yet because not everything is signed and secured,” Ryan Dinkgrave, Senior Grants Manager at Eastern Market told MLive. “We’ve been working with MGM, which is now owned by Amazon, to get the contract signed to use the intellectual property to be able to display it. We’re pretty close.”

It also took quite a bit of time to construct the statue for some of the same reasons. Walley told MLive they had to also contact MGM.

“We had to get the exact model made. That model had to be blown up to over a 10-foot mold. That happened in Vancouver, and Idaho. That took years. Then, the owner of Venus Bronze Works went through a cancer scare. That was two more years.”

Dinkgrave says he believes everything will be finalized sometime in 2024. Once that happens, the statue will be put on public display for all to see in an area where people can hang out and take pictures with it.

And it’s not an easy task to display the statue. Moving and constructing its foundation will likely cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. Dinkgrave says Eastern Market has received some money from the movie studio, but is still in need of more funding for that.

He says once everything is ready to go, he hopes to make a big event of the unveiling and plans to invite actor Peter Weller, who played RoboCop. Plans are also to show the movie on-site.

And as you can see in the photos, the RoboCop statue does not carry a weapon. We’re told the idea was to build it to be a friendly neighborhood RoboCop without a gun.