How 'Jurassic Park' Stomped 'The Last Action Hero,' Arnold's Notorious '90s Dud

Arnold Schwarzenegger in ‘The Last Action Hero’ (Photo: Everett)

This past weekend, Terminator: Genisys was trampled at the box office by Jurassic World, which has spent 3 weeks at No. 1 (and narrowly lost the top spot last weekend to Inside Out). If Arnold Schwarzenegger never wants to see another dinosaur, we wouldn’t be surprised: This is not the first time that a Jurassic movie has foiled his big opening weekend. In June 1993, Last Action Hero — a big-budget adventure film expected to be the hit of the summer — was trounced by Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, then in its second weekend.

Directed by John McTiernan, Last Action Hero is the story of a boy, Danny (Austin O’Brien) who’s magically sucked into the world of his favorite action hero, Jack Slater (Schwarzenegger). Over the course of their adventures, Danny and Slater encounter a number of recognizable movie characters (including the T-1000 from Terminator 2 and Death from The Seventh Seal), befriend a talking cat (voiced by Danny DeVito), and dispose of the body of a flatulent gangster, Leo the Fart. The film ricochets between the real world and the fictional world, but never quite finds it feet in either. The dramatic failure of Last Action Hero was chronicled in a Nancy Griffin story called “How They Built the Bomb,” published in Premiere magazine in September 1993. It’s a fascinating look at the seven weeks before the movie opened, and shows how a potential summer blockbuster went from sure thing to giant flop. Here, some highlights from the definitive account of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most notorious bomb.

Columbia Pictures thought Last Action Hero was a can’t-lose movie.

Schwarzenegger was Hollywood’s biggest star, and as early as November 1992, the studio’s marketing identified Last Action Hero as “the big ticket for ’93.” The film’s outsized promotion included a $20 million Burger King tie-in campaign and the launch of a NASA rocket with “Last Action Hero” and “Schwarzenegger” emblazoned on the side. (The rocket launch was postponed — a fitting side note to the film’s disastrous rollout.)

The first test screening was a nightmare.

The audience was shown an unfinished print, and the film went over like a lead balloon. The response was so bad that Columbia Pictures chairman Mark Canton had all the reaction cards destroyed.

Schwarzenegger tried to save the movie over dinner.

After the terrible test screening, the star summoned studio execs, producers, editors, and director McTiernan to his restaurant, Schatzi, where they had a “strategy session” about how to fix the film. Writes Griffin: “The need to resolve the audience’s confusion about what the films’ villain, Benedict, was doing in the real world was discussed, and everyone agreed that the Leo the Fart funeral scene was much too long.” However, because Columbia was adamant about keeping its premiere date, only minor reshoots occurred. (Oh, and as for Schatzi, the actor’s restaurant-slash-hangout? It closed in 2007, but a mural of the actor as the Terminator was still there a few years ago).

When the film opened, the critics were brutal.

Wrote Today’s Gene Shalit of the meta-adventure: “It’s supposed to be a movie within a movie. Turns out it’s a movie without a movie.” Columbia Pictures was so upset about the negative press that they threatened to cut off all contact with The Los Angeles Times, which had run several stories on the film’s bad buzz.

Schwarzenegger was devastated that Last Action Hero didn’t make people see him as a “real” actor.

According to McTiernan, Schwarzenegger had put a lot of effort into his acting skills on set, learning to sustain long takes from multiple camera angles. “He could never have done that before. It made him very vulnerable, and he was very proud of it,” said the director. “I only know about it because I had spent a year trying to figure out what every twitch of an eyebrow meant on his face. And to be rejected so soundly when he had allowed himself to be so naked — it sort of, like, broke his heart, but I suppose that’s too flowery a phrase. It broke him up terribly.”

In the end, nobody knew whether Last Action Hero was a family film or a shoot-‘em-up.

The film’s tone and promotion vacillated between “kid-friendly” and “hard action,” and it seemed that people wanted more of the latter, less of the former. The studio created TV spots to make Last Action Hero look more like The Terminator or Total Recall, but it was too little, too late. Meanwhile, Last Action Hero action figures — which, at Schwarzenegger’s insistence, did not have guns — were moved to the back shelves of Toys ‘R’ Us, while Jurassic Park dinosaur toys sold out in droves.

The chairman of Columbia Pictures was rumored to have spent the entire opening weekend of Last Action Hero slumped in a chair, watching Jurassic Park over and over again.

Canton adamantly denied the rumor — but it’s still a pretty good one.

Watch a trailer for ‘Last Action Hero.’