Credit: Far Out / Gage Skidmore
Thu 6 August 2026 2:30, UK
It doesn’t matter how big a star someone is; eventually, their luck will run out. In the early 1990s, stars didn’t come much bigger, figuratively or literally, than Arnold Schwarzenegger, but even he wasn’t immune to the inevitable commercial catastrophe.
Bankable actors aren’t called bankable actors because everything they make is guaranteed to be a hit; they earn that tag by the law of averages. Denzel Washington is one of Hollywood’s most consistent draws, but he’s had more than a few bombs, as have Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the rest.
Apart from Red Sonja, the movie Schwarzenegger will always rue as the worst of his career, his decade-long run between Conan the Barbarian and Terminator 2: Judgment Day saw 12 of his 13 releases recoup their budgets at the box office and then some, which is why he was the industry’s most undeniable A-lister.
Fresh from James Cameron’s seminal sequel, his highest-grossing release by quite some distance, the ‘Austrian Oak’ had every right to believe that he was bulletproof. Unfortunately for him, Last Action Hero was the wrong film at the wrong time, and while it wasn’t a catastrophic failure, it still failed badly enough to knock him down a peg or two, even though he claimed he knew it was coming.
“I saw it coming; it was my turn,” he confessed. “I was so high on the pedestal, where else could I go? As soon as there’s vulnerability, I knew the attack would come.” Hindsight will always remain undefeated, but before the self-aware action comedy landed in cinemas in the summer of 1993, he seemed awfully confident that it would continue his hot streak.
The studio threw its weight behind John McTiernan’s fourth wall-breaking caper with a massive marketing campaign, which included paying $500,000 to have the movie’s logo slapped on the side of an unmanned rocket that was blasted into space, in what was a pointlessly expensive way to sell the picture.
Last Action Hero is better than its reputation suggests, and the Hamlet scene in particular stands up against anything that Schwarzenegger has ever done, but it was too far ahead of its time. These days, winking, nodding, self-referential genre flicks are ten-a-penny, but back in the early ’90s, mainstream audiences hadn’t seen a star poking fun at their own image and reputation like that before.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Then, of course, there was Jurassic Park. Going head-to-head in a blockbuster battle with Steven Spielberg is a risk at the best of times, but premiering a week after the cultural phenomenon that became the single biggest hit in cinema history doomed anything that was caught in its wake, with Last Action Hero suffering the most, denting Schwarzenegger’s pride in the process.
On the plus side, it didn’t take him very long to recover, with Arnie reclaiming his spot as the biggest dog in the yard the following summer when he headlined Cameron’s True Lies, the third-top-earning title of 1994, behind only The Lion King and Forrest Gump.
