10 Movie Franchises That Made The Same Mistake TWICE
8. Going PG-13 - RoboCop
Paul Verhoeven's original RoboCop is a gloriously entertaining festival of gratuitous violence and social satire, and while its immediate sequel lacks the same punchy charm, it still delivers enough R-rated thrills to feel worthy enough.
RoboCop 3, however, committed the dual sin of replacing Peter Weller with Robert Burke in the lead role and dropping the content rating from R to PG-13.
Orion Pictures insisted upon this in an attempt to capitalise on RoboCop's popularity with children, despite the inherent ultra-violence of the first two movies.
The result was a neutered threequel which was terribly written with or without violence, but pissed off its grown-up fans by so cynically sanitising a winning formula. Fans perhaps got the last laugh, though, as it was a box office disappointment regardless of opening business to kids.
The movie franchise of course laid dormant for over 20 years after this, and when RoboCop was finally resurrected for a big-budget, star-studded remake, the first question from most fans concerned its MPAA rating.
Everyone involved with the production dragged their feet confirming the truth, that 2014's new RoboCop was also rated PG-13, and to the surprise of no-one it was similarly raked over the coals for feeling de-fanged due to the lack of graphic violence.
After Murphy (Weller) was so brutally killed in the original RoboCop, having him die bloodlessly via a car bomb in the remake felt so thoroughly lame and toothless. Between this and its excessive $130 million budget, RoboCop 2014 predictably tanked at the box office.