Mike Wiza says he has the perfect location for that long-anticipated statue of RoboCop, which remains carefully wrapped and horizontal in an Eastern Market storeroom.

Unfortunately, it’s in Stevens Point, Wisconsin.

Wiza is the mayor of Stevens Point, which may have a more sensible claim to the character than Detroit does. Detroit’s primary role in 1987’s “RoboCop” was to be a toxic urban sludge pit, after all, and the movie was filmed in Dallas.

His offer is meant more as a helping hand than a hostile takeover, though, and as senior grants manager Ryan Dinkgrave of Eastern Market put it in a chat with the Free Press, “That won’t be happening.”

As for what will be happening, or has happened, we have news.

We know where in the market RoboCop will be displayed when he finally clobbers his way out of storage.

We know how much the project has cost, and it’s a startling number — but fear not, citizen, because unless you personally wrote a check, none of the money was yours.

And we know which giant corporation has come to own the 11-foot-tall, 3,500-pound bronze statue, 14 years after the most organic of grassroots campaigns brought the concept to life.

What nobody knows for certain is when we’ll see RoboCop on display. The latest fond hope is September, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of Murals in the Market, but that’s much more a wish than a prediction.

Increasingly long experience has taught Dinkgrave that “It’s never as simple as getting a statue, digging a hole and standing him up.”

But another $50,000 might be all it takes to bring out the shovels.

Star power in Stevens Point

The star of “RoboCop” and “RoboCop 2” was Peter Weller, now 77. The start of Peter Weller came in Stevens Point, smack in the middle of Wisconsin, where he grew up on North Preserve Street.

Wiza, 58, is a close friend and former high school classmate of a Weller cousin, and he governs in what’s probably the only mayoral office anywhere with a signed “RoboCop” movie poster and a RoboCop arcade game.

He first offered to adopt the statue in early 2021, when the Michigan Science Center rescinded its offer to berth the cyborg police officer. That was after earlier word had supposedly cemented the statue’s future at Wayne State University’s Tech Town.

Amid pandemic grumpiness, Wiza said, the notion “really rallied our community. It was all anyone was talking about for weeks.”

Then the RoboGuy landed at Eastern Market, whose good intentions were blunted by annual unforeseen circumstances, the worst of them a bizarrely tragic shooting at a Detroit Lions tailgate last September in which an aggressor and a peacemaker were killed with the same bullet.

“That put everything on pause,” Dinkgrave said, and noting from afar the continued inaction, Wiza reached out to the Free Press to see whether the hulking artwork was once again in the wind.

Taking a stand

To the contrary, it now has a destination.

Dinkgrave confirmed that RoboCop will alight in the northwest reaches of the 24-acre market, near a former fire station at Russell Street and Erskine, amid a welcoming patch of grass and loveliness.

All that’s standing between him and, well, standing, is $50,000, a final chunk of construction fundraising that will boost overall donations to $260,000.

The grand total includes corporate pledges of six figures last year and $50,000 so recently it hasn’t arrived yet, and most of it has been devoted to installation, Dinkgrave said.

There have also been costs for engineering, design, permits and legalities; complications ensue, it turns out, with a massive reproduction of a copyrighted character.

That all follows a 2011 Kickstarter campaign that followed a simple tweet. Someone in Massachusetts reached out to Dave Bing, Detroit’s mayor at the time, to suggest a tribute to RoboCop, on the theory that Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky Balboa and “RoboCop would kick Rocky’s butt.”

Bing dismissed the idea, but experimental filmmaker Brandon Walley and his friends at the arts nonprofit Imagination Station were amused enough to post a pitch online.

In short order, they had raised $67,436, which turned out to be slightly less than $60,000 after commissions and unfulfilled pledges. Detroit sculptor Giorgio Gikas of Venus Bronze Works agreed to accept $65,000 to turn movie fans’ whims into a monument.

More: Rubin: 11-foot-tall Robocop statue is somewhere in Eastern Market awaiting new secret home

Within the last few years, Walley said, Imagination Station gave the statue to Eastern Market. The title now rests with MGM Studios, Dinkgrave said, which is part of the licensing agreement.

“They have to own it,” he explained, “so that if it fell into disrepair, they could reclaim it, not that they have any intention of doing that.”

After assorted mergers, purchases and corporate devouring, MGM is no longer a stand-alone company. Bottom line, the ultimate populist project is now owned by Amazon — but the original spirit should shine.

Something to talk about

For Walley, as an artist, RoboCop will spark conversations about topics like class, design and race. Wayne State professor David Goldberg, speaking to the Free Press in July, dismisssed the movie as a cult classic “only for certain groups of people,” and not the ones who have to defend Detroit as “actually having human beings in it.”

To Mayor Wiza, it’s both more and less than that — a tribute to his city’s most prominent past resident, a reminder of a good and enduring movie, and an 11-foot-tall portrait of joy.

“If they still have the molds,” he said, “I’d settle for a resin replica,” to stand watch in front of city hall or in the roundabout at the north end of town.

He’d still love the original for Stevens Point, he said, but he’ll be part of the throng of tourists posing in front of it once it’s unveiled here, and there’s darned sure space for that photo on his wall.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.

The Free Press welcomes letters to the editor via freep.com/letters.

Detroit Robocop statue’s journey from tweet to bronze to almost home

February 2011

• It started with a tweet from an account named @MT 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 was not amused.  
• Fundraising started with a Kickstarter campaign aiming to raise $50,000 to: “Build a life size-monument of RoboCop in Detroit! Part man, part machine, all crowd funded.” Organizers raised more than $67,000 from  2,718 donors. 
• Peter Weller stars in a “Funny or Die” video rebutting Bing’s disinterest in a Robocop statue: “I don’t find it silly at all.”

March 2011: Weller releases another video under the theme “RoboCharity” to raise money for Forgotten Harvest.

August 2011: Organizers say they hope to host the statue at TechTown and to reveal it in spring 2012 

January 2013: Organizers target spring 2014 to unveil statue.

February 2014: Giorgio Gikas, owner of Venus Bronze Works in Detroit, is chosen to lead building of statue.

May 2018: Organizers announce that Michigan Science Center will host statue.

January 2020: Casting of the statue’s parts is complete with the goal of unveiling it in spring or summer of 2020.

February 2021: The science center can no longer take the statue amid pandemic-era financial challenges. Organizers look for a new home for the statue. 

November 2022: A new home for the Robocop statue emerges: Eastern Market.

November 2023: Robocop star Peter Weller is indifferent about the statue, telling the Free Press’ Julie Hinds  that he “cannot endorse or dis-endorse the Robocop statue.”

July 2024: Robocop sits in an undisclosed location close to Eastern Market as organizers continue to raise money for the statue’s public installation. 

June 2025: Organizers secure a spot in Eastern Market and continue to raise money for it. 

Compiled by Free Press intern Allana Smith from Free Press archives