The statue was crowdfunded through a Kickstarter campaign. Organisers wrote last year that the stainless-steel base weighed half a ton. The idea for the statue appears to have started about a decade ago when a Twitter user, who tagged then-Detroit Mayor Dave Bing in a tweet, noted that Philadelphia has a statue of another movie icon, boxer Rocky Balboa, and that RoboCop would be a “GREAT ambassador for Detroit”. Bing tweeted back, saying there were no plans in Detroit for a statue of RoboCop. But Detroiters Brandon Walley, a filmmaker, and Jerry Paffendorf, co-founder and CEO at Loveland Technologies, ran with the idea, envisioning it as a tourist attraction.