RoboCop COMICS INDEX

INTRODUCTION
By: Glenn Orr

RoboCop 2 was anything but a disaster commercially. If memory serves, it raked in approximately $50 million at the North American box office, which is about what the original RoboCop earned and is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

However, to be fair, I’m sure that $50 million haul was considered somewhat problematic from Orion’s perspective.

Studios make sequels to commercially successful films so as to make even more money on them than was made on their predecessors, thanks in large part to the sequel’s now built-in audience. Orion must’ve expected a box office take of somewhere in the neighborhood of $100-150 million for RoboCop 2. When that didn’t happen, they went into brainstorm mode to try to figure out what went wrong. Their conclusion: Because RoboCop 2 was R-rated, it was unable to effectively capitalize on the teen and pre-teen crowd who rented the hell out of RoboCop on home video but were kept at bay at their local cineplexes by by-the-book movie theater owners. Orion’s solution: Water down the violence and other objectionable content in the next sequel, RoboCop 3, so as to assure a PG-13 rating and (hopefully) a bigger box office tally, as was the case with the PG-13 rated megahits Batman and Jurassic Park.

Of course, what Orion clearly didn’t take into account in their thinking on RoboCop 3 was that you still need to titillate (albeit in a PG-13 kinda way) and tell a good story to get moviegoers, no matter their age, interested enough to spend their time and money on your movie.

NEXT: Corporate Wars