RoboCop statue stands in Eastern Market 15 years after viral tweet

Attention, citizens: RoboCop is officially on patrol.

After nearly 15 years of planning, casting, fits, starts, snags and delays, Detroit’s RoboCop statue is upright at Eastern Market.

The 3,500-pound bronze sculpture by George Gikas and his Venus Bronze Works was erected atop a 1,500-pound base on Wednesday, Dec. 3, along Russell Street south of Mack Avenue. It was a smooth four-hour effort at the end of a bumpy road Brandon Walley couldn’t have imagined before he traveled it.

A RoboCop statue sits in place along Russel Street in the Eastern Market area of Detroit on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. (USA Today Network)

“Triumph. Relief. It’s a bit of all of it,” said Walley, a graphic designer and filmmaker who launched a Kickstarter campaign for the statue in February 2011 with some friends from a Detroit arts nonprofit called Imagination Station. “We’re just excited about the future, and what the statue is going to bring to the market and to Detroiters.”

RoboCop was a police-officer-turned-cyborg who saved Detroit from hoodlums and a venal corporation in a 1987 movie that spawned several sequels.

The first movie was largely filmed in Dallas, and its portrayal of Detroit was considerably less than flattering. Nevertheless, someone called @MT tweeted a suggestion to then-Mayor Dave Bing:

“Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky & RoboCop would kick Rocky’s butt. He’s a GREAT ambassador for Detroit.”

Bing demurred, but Walley’s group was intrigued – and its whimsical fundraising campaign quickly attracted $67,436 in pledges, of which nearly $60,000 was actually donated.

Gikas agreed to build the 11-foot-tall replica for $65,000, ultimately losing money on the project.

Meantime, the well-intentioned founders of the project and their eventual sidekicks at Eastern Market  found themselves doing battle with the realities of location, legalities and further funding.

Finally, Walley said, “it all came together today.”

At 10 a.m. Wednesday, RoboCop was still on his back in his longtime lair, an Eastern Market garage.

He lay still for a 3-D scan – “A bunch of new technology to get a permanent record,” Walley said – and was then hauled to a mini-park in front of a former Detroit firehouse, land donated by a production studio called FREE AGE.

His base and pedestal had been crafted in the previous few days. Then, with a crane and a hi-lo doing the heavy lifting, RoboCop was positioned atop vertical rods extending from his abdomen to just below the frost line.

The final step took less than four hours, Walley said, and everything happened so quickly that the statue’s plaque still isn’t finished.

It will be a QR code, Walley said, directing visitors to a web page offering information and also links for donations to Forgotten Harvest and Eastern Market.

“There are a lot of ways for the statue to give back,” Walley said. “We’re thinking of it almost as a wishing well.”

The overall tab for the statue, from the Kickstarter to the crane, is approaching $260,000, according to Eastern Market. Much of that is targeted donations collected by the market, and it includes legal fees – something no one considered when the campaign began to honor a trademarked character.

The intellectual property and the statue are owned by MGM Studios, which insisted on taking control lest the artwork fall into disrepair.

The contract with MGM required that RoboCop be in place by the end of 2025.

Though the project had encountered years of false starts, delays and altered plans – previous announced sites included the Detroit Science Center and TechTown Detroit – an Eastern Market spokesman assured the Free Press in early November that the deadline would not be a problem.

His confidence was justified, “and it’s wild,” Walley said.

RoboCop, born from a flippant tweet and forged in Detroit, is finally standing guard.

Reach Neal Rubin at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: RoboCop statue stands in Eastern Market 15 years after viral tweet

Reporting by Neal Rubin, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press

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