The 1980s were a wild time for sci-fi movies, in the best way possible. It’s a decade that gave genre fans then-groundbreaking special effects, pop culture defining blockbusters, and covered just about every kind of sci-fi you could want featuring everything from dystopian futures to aliens to time travel and so much more. It’s also a decade that gave us some truly great franchises that continue to excite audiences decades later. Now, one such franchise has landed a new streaming home on Prime Video ahead of Amazon’s new live action series.
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All three original films in the RoboCop franchise — 1987’s RoboCop, 1990’s RoboCop 2, and 1993’s RoboCop 3 — are now available to stream on Prime Video. The three films join other projects in the overall franchise on the platform, including the 2014 RoboCop remake, 1994’s RoboCop: The Series, the animated RoboCop: Alpha Commando, RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop, and RoboCop: Alpha Command: Crash and Burn.
More RoboCop Is In the Works (But The First Movie Remains Unmatched)
While it has been nearly 40 years since the first RoboCop movie was released, it’s a franchise that is showing no signs of slowing down or disappearing anytime soon. Over the years there has been sequels and various franchise expansions into animation, video games, comics, and more and there’s even another live action television series currently in the works. Back in 2024, it was announced that a television series was in the works at Amazon MGM with Peter Ocko as a writer, executive producer, and showrunner and James Wan as an executive producer. Details about the series are few, with the logline reading “a giant tech conglomerate collaborates with the local police department to introduce a technologically advanced enforcer to combat rising crime — a police officer who’s part man, part machine.”
But while a new series is in the works, it is likely to have a long way to go to match the original RoboCop film. The original film, which focused on Peter Weller’s police officer Alex Murphy who, after being mortally wounded in a near-future Detroit ends up being turned into the ruthless cyborg RoboCop by the megacorporation Omni Consumer Products. It’s an exciting and original premise that was only made better with its use of action sequences and often extreme violence and while it was met with some criticism for that violence, audiences seemed to agree that the film was solid as it was a box office success and did extremely well upon home release, so much so that it got sequels. That said, the first film is just special. Even with the extreme violence, the film is deeply intelligent, offering well-done satire as well as asking some deeper, more philosophical questions of its audience about power, greed, and corporations as well as about what humanity really is. There’s been nothing quite like it since, even within the franchise and while the film’s themes are on some level always relevant, the original RoboCop is quite honestly a masterpiece — and one worth streaming now on Prime Video.
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