7. Poor Mr Kinney
When the film went up for classification, it was given the dreaded X rating. Receiving an X rating was a death note for a major film because it meant that your audience is restricted to over 18's and commercial distribution would be limited. Verhoeven had no choice but to cut out some of the blood and gore. The scenes that caused the most problem were ED-209 making mince meat out of poor Mr Kinney in the boardroom and Murphy's violent execution where his arm is blasted off. Verhoeven trimmed the offending scenes as much as possible and included more humorous adverts to lighten the film. Verhoeven thought the edits actually made the violence more gruesome. RoboCop went up for classification a total of 11 times before it finally received the R Rating it was after. All the edited scenes were included in full for the directors cut. Murphy's death scene nearly didn't get shot at all. Running behind schedule and over budget, Verhoeven had to inform Orion that the key scene of Alex Murphy's execution, had to be cut. Orion were obviously not happy but agreed to increase the budget so that the scene could get finished. Verhoeven probably deliberately left that scene out because he knew that RoboCop would make no sense without it and therefore the studio would be forced to increase the budget to make it happen.