On paper, “Last Action Hero” is actually a pretty clever idea. A satire and fantasy rolled into one, it tells the story of a young kid who is magically dropped into the upcoming movie starring his hero Jack Slater (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger). And with an in-his-prime John McTiernan (“Die Hard,” “The Hunt For Red October“) behind the camera, the ingredients were there for success. But a couple of bad decisions doomed the movie.
For one, McTiernan complained that the movie “was whipped out unedited, practically assembled right out of the camera. It was in the theater five or six weeks after I finished shooting,” and then there was the decision to open the picture just one week after the hugely anticipated, and record-breaking “Jurassic Park.” It was a situation where failure was probably the only option, but Schwarzenegger has another theory.
Speaking with Business Insider, he points to the finger to the White House, which he says influenced the pop culture climate against the kind of popcorn movie he was offering. “It was one of those things where President Clinton was elected and the press somehow made the whole thing kind of political where they thought, ‘Okay, the ‘80s action guys are gone here’s a perfect example,’ and they wrote this narrative before anyone saw the movie,” Schwarzenegger said.
“The action hero era is over, Bill Clinton is in, the highbrow movies are the ‘in’ thing now, I couldn’t recuperate,” he added.
Well, certainly, the sort of action movies that dominated the screen in the ’80s were on their way out. We can speculate that maybe the mood in the political sphere had some impact, but also, maybe just more people wanted to see “Jurassic Park.”