12 Iconic Movie Characters Who Were Disastrously Recast

11. RoboCop - Joel Kinnaman

The Film: RoboCop (2014)

In The Original: Peter Weller

There's an argument that suggests that the 2014 RoboCop remake was just too glossy for its own good: it might have had a starrier cast and better effects, but it simply wasn't as acerbic or subversive as the original. And a significant issue came with the casting of Joel Kinnaman in the lead.

Where Peter Weller was interesting and his performance felt like he was actually having fun playing a cartoonish cyborg character stripped of his humanity. Even behind the mask, he was able to offer an answer to that missing humanity (which was always the most interesting part of the plot), and crucially, we cared about him.

Unfortunately, aside from a reasonably strong opening, Kinnaman fails to capture that empathy, even as the film ladles on the parallels to returning, injured war veterans, and he's just not very interesting at all. As a result, the film is missing the key personality that drove the original so importantly.