The disastrous Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Clint Eastwood called “a piece of crap”
Other than their shared forays into politics and inarguable status as two of action cinema’s all-time titans, Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger have rarely travelled in the same circles.
Which is ironic, when the ‘Austrian Oak’ considers the legendary actor and filmmaker one of his Hollywood heroes, and a source of constant inspiration. The two longtime California residents are friends and have been for a long time, but they’ve never worked together in a professional capacity.
Eastwood did joke that he’d rather direct an Expendables movie than appear in one, though, but that’s about it. As far as Schwarzenegger goes, he channelled the Dirty Harry icon in The Last Stand, praised Unforgiven as one of his favourite films, and saw his longevity as something to admire and emulate.
In the early 1990s, they were at different points in their careers. The future governor was still arguably the industry’s single biggest, and definitely highest-paid, star, while Eastwood was fresh from the success of his aforementioned magnum opus, which had cleaned up at the Academy Awards.
They both had high-profile movies releasing that summer, although Eastwood’s In the Line of Fire was in a much better position than Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero, because it cost less than half as much to make and it wasn’t brazen or stupid enough to go head-to-head with Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.
The studio pushed the boat out for Last Action Hero, which included running an ad on a rocket and blasting it into space for some reason, only for the action genre’s holy trinity of director John McTiernan, screenwriter Shane Black, and leading man Schwarzenegger to get swallowed whole by the dinosaurs.
These days, it’s been reappraised as an underrated gem that was ahead of its time, but in the summer of 1993, it was a disaster. While Jurassic Park became the highest-grossing film in history, Last Action Hero drastically underperformed, was cold-shouldered by critics, and became Schwarzenegger’s biggest embarrassment.
Some of the damage had already been done before audiences had seen it, though, with an early screening bringing forth diabolical word-of-mouth. Speaking to Roger Ebert, Eastwood explained why it was a fool’s errand to show the picture to the press before everything was locked, loaded, and fine-tuned.
“You try to do a working screening, maybe find out what you’ve got or figure out some changes, but it doesn’t come out that way,” he reasoned. “Somebody sees it and gives it out to the papers, and it’s a piece of crap. Maybe you weren’t ready to show it publicly. I just think you should work it out in your own mind, instead of doing all those sneaks.”
Of course, Eastwood has never been involved in anything even remotely like Last Action Hero, but he still knew that showing an almost-but-not-quite finished blockbuster ahead of time is a risk that has the potential to backfire spectacularly, which it did.
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