Arnold Schwarzenegger made one of the biggest flops of his career in the 90s and a US president was to blame

With roles in films such as Predator, Terminator and The Phantom Commando, Arnold Schwarzenegger became one of the greatest action icons ever. However, not every film with the star was a guaranteed hit. One of Arnie’s biggest financial failures was Last Action Hero from 1993.

The story of the young boy Danny (Austin O’Brien), who is transported by a magical film ticket into the fictional cinema world of his idol and action hero Jack Slater (Schwarzenegger), only brought in 50 million dollars from a budget of 85 million dollars. In a 2017 interview, Schwarzenegger once again named someone to blame for this flop result – a former US president!

Arnie blames action flop on then-new US president

In the Business Insider interview, the actor is asked whether Last Action Hero would be much better received by people today who are seeing the action film for the first time. Schwarzenegger replies that the disappointing box office result at the time had a lot to do with the social change to do with Bill Clinton, who became US President in 1993:

It was one of those things where President Clinton was elected and the press kind of made the whole thing political by thinking, ‘Okay, the ’80s action guys are out of date, this is a perfect example,’ and they wrote this story before anyone had seen the movie.And I could see that even before the movie was released, stories were popping up about how the movie was still being filmed and that it was supposed to come out in two months, so why is it still being filmed? The era of action heroes is over, Bill Clinton is here, sophisticated films are now inI couldn’t recover from it.Arnie says that Last Action Hero was treated like the biggest failure ever, while other films that year performed even worse at the box office and not mentioned at all. In his view, his film was used as an example to mark the end of a certain type of action hero.

Here is another German Last Action Hero trailer:

If you want to watch Last Action Hero again, you can watch the film currently only available on Magenta TV in the Flat stream. Otherwise, you can rent or buy the Schwarzenegger film from providers such as Amazon Prime.

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