RoboCop Will Patrol The Home Video Beat This June
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After one release-date shift and no end of internet finger-wagging, Jose Padilha’s RoboCop remake finally hit theaters last month with an emphatic “eh.” It certainly wasn’t as bad as it could have been, and it actually had some genuinely effective elements — the reveal of what’s actually left of Murphy was a beautiful bit of body horror — but Robo’s shiny upgrade wasn’t enough to lure in throngs of American moviegoers, bringing in only $57 million against its $100 million production budget domestically. For all my qualms about the remake, however, I have no doubt that this is a flick that’s going to do well and find a larger audience on home video. If you skipped it in theaters, mark your calendar: RoboCop will be serving the public trust on Blu-Ray and DVD on June 9. It’ll also be available for digital download the week before, on June 2.
Just as in Paul Verhoeven’s darkly humorous original, this incarnation of RoboCop sees good cop Alex Murphy (The Killing’s Alex Kinnaman) critically injured — in this case, blown the fuck up by a car bomb — and swiftly recruited for an Omnicorp program that sees him reborn as the ultimate in law enforcement, a badass cyborg cop who is, unfortunately for his rebuilders, still bedeviled by a pesky glimmer of free will. That notion is the subject of one of the bonus featurettes the Blu-Ray/DVD is packing, so you can probably expect the cast and crew’s talking heads to weigh in on the subject. You’ll also get some deleted scenes and several “Omnicorp Corporate” (is that redundant?) featurettes highlighting the various shiny bits of tech on display in this latter-day RoboCop.
Here’s the full rundown of bonus features:
Deleted Scenes – 3’ 55’’
- PENTAGON 1
- RIGHT HAND
- HELICOPTER
- LEWIS AND DEAN
- NORTON CONFESSES TO DREYFUS
Omnicorp Corporate – 3’45’’
- EXO-SKELETON
- EM-208
- ED-209
- XT-908
- CRUISER 1
- TSR-66
- M2 BATTLE RIFLE
- RC-2000 V1
- RC-2000 V3
- NEXT GENERATION ROBOCOP
Featurettes
- The Illusion of Free Will – 7’ 46’’
- To Serve and Protect – 5’ 49’’
- The Robocop Suit – 15’
The remake will be available in the usual Blu-ray and DVD varieties, as well as a limited-edition Blu-ray “Steelbook” set. If the Steelbook includes any extra goodies, the press release doesn’t detail them. But on the upside, it might be infinitesimally more likely to deflect a bullet if you have it it tucked into your coat pocket during the walk home from Best Buy. And if not, hey, they can always rebuild you. Better, faster, stronger…no wait, wrong cyborg.
While the RoboCop reboot didn’t blow up the box office nearly as well as it blew up Alex Murphy, overseas audiences saved the day, much as they have for other flicks such as (the way more entertaining) Pacific Rim. With foreign box office factored in, Robo’s global take leaps from $57 million all the way to $239 million, more than doubling the aforementioned production budget. Does that mean we might get an unlikely sequel? Well, the original got a series of increasingly horrible sequels and TV spinoffs, so why not? Maybe next time it’ll get the one upgrade it needed more than a coat of glossy black paint — a better script.
