In addition to box office hits, Arnold Schwarzenegger has also had to cope with flops in his career. In his opinion, one financial failure happened because of a former US president
With roles in films such as Predator, Terminator and The Phantom Menace, Arnold Schwarzenegger became one of the biggest action icons ever. However, not every movie featuring the star was a sure-fire hit. Arnie’s biggest financial failures include Last Action Hero from 1993.
The story of the boy Danny (Austin O’Brien), who is transported into the fictional movie world of his idol and action hero Jack Slater (Schwarzenegger) by a magical movie ticket, only made 50 million dollars on a budget of 85 million dollars. In a 2017 interview, Schwarzenegger once again named a culprit for this flop result – a past US president!
Arnie blames action flop on then-fresh US president
In the Business Insider interview the actor is asked about the fact that Last Action Hero would be much better received by people seeing the action movie for the first time nowadays. Schwarzenegger replies that the disappointing box office result at the time had a lot to do with the social upheaval associated with Bill Clinton becoming US President in 1993:
It was one of those things where President Clinton got elected and the press kind of politicized the whole thing by thinking, ‘Okay, the action guys of the ’80s have had their day, this is a perfect example,’ and they wrote this story before anyone had seen the movie.
And I could see stories popping up even before the movie was released that the movie was still being shot and it was supposed to come out in two months, so why is it still being shot? The era of action heroes is over, Bill Clinton is here, the sophisticated movies are in now, I couldn’t get over it
Read it yet? Arnold Schwarzenegger has been ashamed of Last Action Hero for 30 years and James Cameron is making things worse today
Arnie says that Last Action Hero was treated like the biggest failure ever at the time, while other films did even worse at the box office that year and weren’t even mentioned. In his opinion, his movie was used as an example to herald the dying era of a certain type of action hero
Here’s another German Last Action Hero trailer:
If you want to watch Last Action Hero again, you can currently only stream the movie with Magenta TV in the Flat. Otherwise, you can rent or buy the Schwarzenegger film from providers such as Amazon Prime
