12 Years Later, the Most Divisive Sci-Fi Reboot of All Time Departs Streaming on March 31

Published Mar 22, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT

Chris is a Senior News Writer for Collider. He can be found in an IMAX screen, with his eyes watering and his ears bleeding for his own pleasure. He joined the news team in 2022 and accidentally fell upwards into a senior position despite his best efforts.

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Some reboots arrive with an impossible job. They are asked to update a classic, justify their own existence, and somehow avoid being compared to the original every five seconds. That was always going to be the case with RoboCop, the 2014 remake of Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic. More than a decade later, it is still one of the most argued-over studio reboots of its era, and now Prime subscribers are running out of time to revisit it.

Directed by José Padilha, the film stars Joel Kinnaman as Alex Murphy, a Detroit cop who is critically injured and rebuilt as a cybernetic law-enforcement weapon by OmniCorp. This version leans harder into glossy near-future surveillance and corporate control than the savage satire of Verhoeven’s film, which is a big part of why it split audiences so sharply when it arrived in 2014. And at the rate Kinnaman is going in Apple TV's For All Mankind, his ancient Ed Baldwin might well be in his own robot suit by the end of it.

Whatever people think of it, the film was not short on talent. The cast includes Gary Oldman as Dr. Dennett Norton, Michael Keaton as Raymond Sellars, Abbie Cornish as Clara Murphy, Jackie Earle Haley as Maddox, Michael K. Williams as Jack Lewis, Jennifer Ehle as Liz Kline, Jay Baruchel as Pope, and Samuel L. Jackson as Pat Novak. Yes, it actually has a really good cast, which didn't help.

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By Macklen Makhloghi

Is 'RoboCop' Worth Watching?

Collider’s review stated that remaking a film as iconic as RoboCop is always a risky move, and while José Padilha wisely avoids a beat-for-beat retread of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 original, his reimagining struggles to carve out a clear identity of its own. Instead of leaning into the original’s satire and unapologetic violence, this version pivots toward a mix of social commentary and emotional family drama. It’s an admirable shift in direction, but one that ultimately spreads itself too thin.

"The film is peppered with charismatic performances (especially from Keaton) and some clever moments like RoboCop being made in China, but Padilha's reach exceeds his grasp because he's grasping at too much. In his commendable attempt to distinguish his RoboCop from Verhoeven's, he's come up with a picture that's very much like his protagonist: Fighting to find an identity, but the wires keep getting crossed."

Prime subscribers have until March 31 to stream RoboCop before it leaves.