12 Movie Remakes That Completely Screwed Up Iconic Scenes

9. Alex Murphy's Death - RoboCop

The Original: Paul Verhoeven is renowned for his brilliantly gory action scenes, and arguably the very best takes place at the start of RoboCop, where cop Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is brutally slain by Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) and his gang of thugs. It's an extremely unpleasant scene, in which Murphy has his hand blown off before being riddled with countless shotgun blasts, all while the perpetrators laugh at Murphy and thoroughly humiliate him. It disturbed me to no end as a child, and has stuck with me ever since. As such, when Murphy becomes RoboCop, we can't wait for him to get bloody revenge.

The Remake: Jose Padilha's remake is crippled at the first step by its stifling PG-13 rating, which naturally means a lack of gore and foul language, and this is felt no more than in the equivalent scene of Alex's demise. Even ignoring the fact that Alex doesn't die in this version (he's just really, really hurt), the scene lacks the same visceral impact because it's so sudden and obscured: Alex goes outside to tend to his car alarm, only to be engulfed in a fireball as the car bomb explodes. The lack of a personal touch, combined with the fact that the villain in this version is such a non-entity, makes this unquestionably inferior to the original take.