RoboCop

Paul Verhoeven's 1987 RoboCop remains the sharpest thing this franchise ever produced: a savage satire of corporate America, privatized policing and Reagan-era consumerism, smuggled inside a hard-R action picture. Everything after it has chased that high. RoboCop 2 and the softened RoboCop 3 lost the bite, the TV incarnations RoboCop: The Series and Prime Directives went the grim syndication route, and the 2014 remake polished the surface while dropping the venom.

The most faithful recent custodians have been the games. RoboCop: Rogue City and its Unfinished Business expansion return to the grime of Old Detroit and let you embody Murphy's slow, heavy menace, while a Mortal Kombat 11 cameo keeps the design alive in pop culture. Spanning film, television and games, the series is best understood as one great movie and a long tail of attempts to recapture it.

The RoboCop franchise spans 3 series, 4 games, 4 films in the CrossBinge catalog.