Immediately after release, the film hovered around . Over the next decade, it has slowly climbed to 6.1 . Why? Because the film’s primary crime was not being the 1987 movie. As time passes, a new generation of viewers—who don’t have the original burned into their nostalgic cortex—is discovering the 2014 version as a standalone piece of near-future cyberpunk.
Joel Kinnaman (of The Killing fame) is a fine actor, but his Murphy is emotionally available, handsome, and conflicted from the start. The 1987 film worked because Peter Weller’s Murphy was a corpse—a thing learning to remember humanity. IMDb’s “Quotes” section for the 2014 film is sparse. The 1987 page is a library of one-liners. You can’t algorithmically manufacture that kind of cultural grit. Here’s the twist that makes the 2014 RoboCop a fascinating case study. Look at the IMDb rating over time .
IMDb user Quicksand wrote in a top-voted review: “RoboCop without the gore is like The Terminator without the chase scenes. It’s a corporate product about a corporate product, and it forgot to be angry.” That review has over 2,000 upvotes. According to IMDb’s “StarMeter” and biographical data, the film’s cast is objectively excellent: Gary Oldman (a true chameleon), Michael Keaton (in his post-Academy Award cool-down), and Samuel L. Jackson as a bombastic, Glenn Beck-style TV host. The problem? The man inside the suit.
Today, the 2014 RoboCop sits at a modest on IMDb, based on over 280,000 user ratings. For comparison, the 1987 original stands at a towering 7.6 . But a deeper dive into the data and the film’s trajectory reveals a story less about failure and more about a profound misunderstanding of audience expectations. The Curve of Disappointment (And Its Secrets) Let’s look at the IMDb breakdown. The 2014 film’s rating histogram is a bell curve skewed left. The largest single voting block (approx. 18%) gave it a 6 , while nearly 15% awarded a perfect 10 . But crucially, almost 12% gave it a 1 .