The Austrian-American actor Arnold Schwarzenegger can look back on a long career. It’s no wonder that among his numerous films, there are some flops as well. However, there is one failure that Schwarzenegger has not been able to recover from to this day.
Which flop can he not cope with? In 1993, the film Last Action Hero was released. In it, Schwarzenegger plays the action hero Jack Slater, but the film is rather intended as a parody of the action film genre. For example, Sylvester Stallone appears in the film, with whom Schwarzenegger ended his feud in the 90s.
The film currently has a rating of 6.5 out of 10 stars on IMDb and was only moderately successful at the time. With a budget of 85 million US dollars, the film grossed 137 million US dollars internationally.
However, the film flopped in the USA. There it only brought in 50 million US dollars at the box office. Only in the following years did the film gain popularity and benefit from Schwarzenegger’s humor and self-irony.
Here you can convince yourself of Schwarzenegger’s acting talent back then:
James Cameron has no kind words for Arnold Schwarzenegger
How did Schwarzenegger react? In the documentary “Arnold,” which premiered on Netflix a few months ago, Schwarzenegger recounts that he could not come to terms with the failure:
It hurts. It makes you feel bad. It’s embarrassing. (…) I didn’t want to see anyone for a week.
Also, director James Cameron, who worked with him on Terminator and Terminator 2, got wind of Schwarzenegger’s state at the time. In the documentary, the Titanic director doesn’t exactly mince words with Schwarzenegger. He claims that at that time it looked as if the actor “was crying in bed.”
However, contrary to expectations that the failure was a mistake and damaged Schwarzenegger’s image, his next film was a complete success. A year later, the actor appeared in the film True Lies, which became a box office hit under Cameron’s direction.
So Schwarzenegger owes part of his success to Cameron. The director was also the one who made Schwarzenegger a “good machine” in Terminator 2. Schwarzenegger explains this as the reason for the success of the film, which gave his acting career a significant boost.
A MeinMMO survey also showed that True Lies is rated higher by you than Last Action Hero. However, Schwarzenegger is most celebrated in films like Terminator 2 and Predator.
Anyone who wants to convince themselves of Last Action Hero unfortunately has to spend money for that. The film is currently not available on any streaming service. Instead, you can buy the film on Apple TV or Amazon Prime, for example.
Schwarzenegger and Cameron had a dispute in the past. It was about a line from Terminator that almost everyone should know: Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t actually want to say a famous line from Terminator.
