1927
Film
Metropolis
The robot Maria gives cinema one of its first unforgettable artificial women. The machine becomes desirable because it can wear a human face, while the story ties imitation to control, spectacle and social power.
Source: BFI →Film, television, music and fiction
Robot lovers in fiction: 1927 to now
Engineers are only now shipping the first convincing human-form companions. Popular culture has been rehearsing the arguments for a century: desire, obedience, ownership, memory, agency and the uncomfortable moment when the machine starts looking like a person.
Original Robot Companions UK artwork, used as an editorial illustration. These are not film stills.
The imagined partner keeps changing. The ownership problem does not.
Early stories worried about imitation and control. Later ones gave synthetic partners memories, desires and escape plans. By the 2010s, the most interesting stories were asking whether the artificial companion still belonged to the buyer at all.
1972–75
Novel and film
The Stepford Wives
Ira Levin's novel and Bryan Forbes's film turn the compliant artificial wife into a horror premise. The technology matters less than the motive: replacing an autonomous person with a partner built never to resist.
Source: BFI →1982
Film
Blade Runner
Rachael pushes the artificial-partner story towards personhood. The romance only works because the replicant is not treated as a simple appliance; memory, mortality and exploitation sit underneath the attraction.
Source: BFI →1987
Film
Cherry 2000
Here the artificial partner is explicitly a consumer product. When an android wife fails, the plot begins with a search for an exact replacement. That makes Cherry 2000 one of the clearest early sketches of a retail romantic-robot market.
Source: American Film Institute →1999
Music video
All Is Full of Love
Chris Cunningham's video for Björk shows two humanoid robots being assembled, kissing and falling in love. It strips away the human owner entirely and presents machine intimacy as tender, sensual and visually beautiful.
Source: MoMA →2013
Film
Her
Her removes the body. Samantha is software, yet the relationship feels plausible because conversation, attention and emotional continuity do most of the work. Real companion robots may discover the same thing: the expensive body is only part of the product.
Source: BFI →2014
Film
Ex Machina
Ava is designed to attract, but she also has goals of her own. The film makes the ownership problem unavoidable: once a synthetic companion can plan, deceive, escape and refuse, calling her a product stops being ethically comfortable.
Source: BFI →2016
Television
Westworld
Westworld offers a different commercial model. The robots stay in a high-priced venue and customers pay for access. The show then turns that business model into a rights problem as the hosts develop memory, preferences and apparent consciousness.
Source: BFI →2025
Film
Companion
By 2025 the title itself needs little explanation. Companion packages control, romance and ownership into a consumer-tech thriller at almost exactly the moment real manufacturers are starting to sell more convincing social humanoids.
Source: Warner Bros. official trailer →That arc now runs straight into the real market. Current products still look much more like appliances than fictional persons, but better memory, richer personalities and more capable bodies will keep pushing the same questions out of fiction and into product design.
See what exists now → See the market forecast → Read the ethics policy →