Massive, bronze RoboCop statue
Eastern Market / Wasserman Projects
3434 Russell St.
Dec. 24, 2025
Detroit doesn’t have a ton of cinematic icons we can build a tourist attraction around. There’s no Rocky here like in Philadelphia.
We now do have a massive cyborg cop from a dystopian action movie from the 1980s that has had people up in arms about what it says about our city and if it actually belongs here at all.
The Robo Cop statue finally went up this month. It took 15 years for this statue to come to fruition, so no matter what I write about this thing, it’s all going to feel a little anti-climatic.
That’s a big departure from the action-packed ending of “RoboCop.” The 1987 movie with Peter Weller as a super cop cyborg shows a futuristic Detroit as a poorly managed, crime-ridden city that’s fast approaching a privatized police force that relies on faulty technology to control the masses, guilty or not (not too far off from where we’re at).
What took 15 years? A lot of debate of where to put this thing, which was actually finished all the way back in 2017 by Detroit sculptor Giorgio Gikas.
There’s no knocking the work of Gikas. This piece is gorgeous and detailed, clocking in more than 11 feet tall and weighing 3,500 pounds. Where it’s placed and the composition of the statue itself amongst its environment are always key, and I can say this particularly “thicc” version of RoboCop blends nicely with its surroundings.
It’s a welcoming piece of pop culture as you enter Eastern Market. It looks sharp outside the brick facade of the Wasserman Projects, which hosts a bounty of boundary-pushing art shows throughout the year.
You’ll likely agree -- if you have a sense of humor about the city. That’s another reason that kept the RoboCop statue from being erected after first finding its footing following a successful $67,000 crowdfunding campaign from 2,700 backers worldwide 15 years ago.
Can you accept the RoboCop statue as a fun piece of pop ephemera? Or does it make something quite serious seem trivial, like the Detroit Police Department’s track record of brutality and blundering with new technology that some argue turns the city into a surveillance state?
Compositionally, it’s quite a feat of bronze work. If it raises any questions at all, then we’re dealing with a good piece of art that finally found a home after a long journey to get there.