WHAT WENT WRONG - Last Action Hero

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Sony bids against itself for a script, a writer re-writes a parody of his own writing, and the 80s action movie goes out with a whimper. This week Chris & Lizzie learn how Last Action Hero was doomed by an insane release date, brutal test screening, and historically bad press.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris, do you want to be simultaneously confused, infuriated, and enthralled all at the same time? Like when I watch my dog pee in my parents' house? Not quite like that, although maybe similar. If that appeals to you, may I recommend Emily in Paris on Netflix. Oh, but may I remind you, it's supposed to be pronounced. Emily in Paris so that it rhymes

no Netflix tweeted about it and then Jermaine Clement from Fight of the Concords goes you should have called it Barry and Perry that was the best response that's great

well to our loyal audience that just made it through that welcome back to another episode of what went wrong as always I am Chris Winterbauer here with Lizzie Bassett who's just doling out hard recommendations left and right.

And Lizzie, let me ask you, uh, did you think this week's movie was pretty entertaining? I did. I kind of liked it. Because I did. Yeah. And of course this week we were talking about the Arnold Schwarzenegger

star vehicle 1993's last action hero, uh, which was starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austin O'Brien, Charles Dance, a number of other cameos. we'll get into. Produced and directed by John McTiernan, released by Sony under their Columbia Pictures banner. And the film follows Austin O'Brien's Danny Madigan as he's magically transported into the cinematic universe of Jack Slater, an indestructible Los Angeles police officer,

played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, both in the movie and in the movie, if that makes sense. It doesn't. And a large portion of the plot also doesn't. It doesn't make sense. The movie was intended to be a high concept takedown of the action genre, which had kind of peaked in the late 80s. It was the action satire to end all action satires. Unfortunately, it struck a sour note with critics and audiences alike. It was stomped on at the box office by Jurassic Park. So how did a film that was predicted and proclaimed to be, quote, the blockbuster hit of 1993,

become yet another cautionary tale in a Hollywood's history of bad box office. office bets. All right. So before we get started, thank you very much to Javier Merrin for recommending this. Excellent recommendation. And we hope you enjoy the behind-the-scenes details. So without further ado, let's kick the fucking door down and get some answers. By the early 1990s, Hollywood, as we know, is developing this reputation for fiscal irresponsibility. Some movies that we're going to cover but haven't yet. Ishtar, the Cotton Club. Some movies we have covered, Heaven's Gate, and most recently, Bonfire of the Vanities, have proven to be very unpopular with audiences. And to make matters worse, they've gotten increasingly expensive. The

average budget of a Hollywood release in 1972 was 1.9 million. The average budget of a Hollywood release in 1992 was 28.9 million. So 14 times greater over 20 years. And it can't be explained by there were fewer movies because there were actually more movies released in 1992 than in 1972 by about 100. That's nuts. It's nuts. And the box office was growing too, but each project became riskier and riskier. And so at this point in time, right after Bonfire of the Vanities, there's this inner office memo penned by a high-level executive in Hollywood that gets leaked to the press and it spreads like wildfire. And the memo says, quote, each of us is trying to outrun and out-spend and out-earned the other in a mad sprint toward the mirage of the next blockbuster. This box office mania is

fostering a frenzy among actors, writers, directors, and their agents. The time has come to get back to our roots. If we remain on our current course, there will be certainty of calamitous failure. Now, ironically, the executive that wrote that was Jeffrey Katzenberg, who just helmed Quibi, which spent over a billion dollars and shuddered after being in existence for roughly six months. Now, the audience happily ignored Katzenberg's advice, as he later would himself when he launched Quibby and made the awful Hudson Hawk, for example, in 1991, Bruce Willis vehicle lost $47 million. Yeah, they made us watch that in history class. I don't know why. I guess it's history.

It's not. So enter a new player into the Hollywood scene. Sony Pictures Entertainment. In 1987, Sony Electronics bought CBS Records and it kind of shook things up a little bit. And then in 1989, they purchased Columbia pictures and TriStar pictures from Coca-Cola for $3.5 billion. And they were like, we're going to be a player in media. We make the electronics. We want to make what goes in the electronics now. They also assumed a billion dollars in debt that the studios owed, and they decided that they were going to headhunt the best of the best,

and we've talked about this guy before, Peter Goober, to come in and run their studio, who had just put together bonfire of the vanities. So they hire him away from Warner Brothers. And to remind you guys, he had produced Rain Man, Batman, the color purple, gorillas in the mist, wishes of Eastwick, Flash Dance, and an American Werewolf in London, just to name a few. And then they also brought in this guy from Warner Brothers, whose name was John Peters. He deserves a podcast episode himself.

I'm not going to go into details. He was Barbara Streisand's hairdresser turned lover, turned producer, who claimed total credit for a star is born when it's unclear what he actually did. And he's maybe most famous for kind of possibly driving. the ill-fated Tim Burton, Nicholas Cage Superman reboot into the ground, which also deserves its own episode. So in the end, I'm just trying to get through some financial figures. Sony spent over $750 million more dollars just to bring these two producers to Sony Pictures Entertainment. We've talked about this before, but just to hit it one more time, they had to acquire Goober and Peters company for $200 million plus dollars. They gave them contracts that were like $50 million

plus and then they got sued by Warner Brothers saying it was like breach of contract and they had to settle with Warner Brothers for $500 million to sidestep the issue. So at this point, Sony spent over $5 billion just to get this studio running with these two guys at the head of it. Expectations are high for this new player in town. Goober and Peters thinking they've got this like blank check. They go and they set up the new lot in Culver City and that's the Sony lot in Culver City now and they start apparently just hiring nepotistically. Like they're bringing in family. and friends. They're like spending all this money. The studio changed names to Sony Pictures Entertainment. And then Goober brings in to be the new head of production, Mark Canton. And if you

don't remember Mark Canton, he was from our Bonfire of the Vanities episode. He was the vice president of production who had, when he watched the rough cut of Bonfire of the Vanities, clapped and said it was the greatest film he'd ever seen. Only, only distanced himself from it after it had been released. So Canton comes in and his last project that he's associated with is Bonfire of the Vanities. Not a project you want to have following you around. And determined to wipe the slate clean, he's like, the first movie I make at Sony

has to be a huge home run. It just has to be a home run. And it's going to be an action blockbuster franchise. It's going to make lethal weapon look tiny. It's going to make Batman look silly. Money was no object. We will spend whatever it takes to make an amazing movie. We just need to find a script.

And he has no idea like what movie that should be. And so... This is a weird choice. for that, especially for a franchise, because this movie makes no sense as a franchise. A lot of stuff doesn't make sense. I think, as we've talked about on the show, trying to reverse engineer a hit. Yeah. Not a great place to start. At the same time, Zach Penn and Adam Leff, who are these two recent graduates from Wesleyan, are working on their third screenplay, and their first two didn't sell. So they're like, why didn't our first two sell? They look at the marketplace,

and they're like, what's successful in Hollywood? Action movies. Lethal weapon and die hard. They rented the movies like a dozen times. They reverse engineered them. And they created the ultimate parody meta version of that movie. And it's a similar plot to the final film. Young boy magically transplanted into the movie universe of his favorite action hero, Jack Slater.

And because the boy is so well versed in the genre, he can foresee every obstacle that Slater faces, helping him win the day. It's like pretty good. It's a solid idea. Solid idea. Also, should be known, Zach Penn, very successful writer now, wrote X2,

X-Men United, X-Men The Last Stand, The Avengers. Like, he's a very big superhero writer now. So, by October of 91, they've got a finished draft,

and they've titled it extremely violent. And it was supposed to be, like, a little kid, like a kid's version, you know, of this world. So their agent

finally reads the draft. He apparently just, like, refused to read it, refused to read it, and then he stood up at a lunch, and so he just had it with him and was like, fine, I'll read it. And then, like, 45 minutes in, he was just like, holy shit, this could actually sell.

He sets up a bidding war amidst the five studios, sending him out the script, calling it this prized property that took all the best ingredients from recent action films, like, dials them all to 11, and the ploy works, although not in the way that anyone would have expected. In an incredibly stupid move, the two bidders end up being Columbia Pictures and TriStar pictures, both companies owned by Sony. So after the dust settled, Columbia bought the script for

$350,000. And Steve Ross, the head of Columbia at that time, later said he'd felt like he'd just won the lottery. Not quite in the way he thought. So they've got their script. Mark Canton's thrilled. But now, to really get the movie going, they need the star. When Penn and Leff had written the script, they had even called the character in an early draft, Arna. Slater because he was supposed to be Arnold Schwarzenegger riff. And so they thought that it would get made with like a Dolf Lundgren or something like that. You know, like

a riff on Arnold. And the studio actually was like maybe Bruce Willis but Bruce Willis had just flamed out in Bonfire of the Vanities and Hudson Hawk. So he was kind of in movie jail for a little bit. Then they thought about Mel Gibson but he was obviously already the lead of lethal weapon. And then Clint Eastwood, but he was 61 and too old.

They even thought about Sylvester Stallone, but he just, they said literally, he he wasn't funny. And so they're like, we can't have him in this movie. It's just not funny. He does have the cameo of being at the blockbuster. Yes. In the movie world within the movie, Sylvester Stallone played Terminator in that franchise. Yeah. So I think one of the reasons they weren't going to initially go to Arnold, maybe, was just because he was actually so big. It seemed like a long shot to get him. If you don't know, Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1993 was at the peak of his powers. He was 44.

looked great, very handsome in this movie. And he was just like, he would have been a huge win for them. He's obviously this Austrian-born bodybuilder turned actor, and his most recent film was Terminator 2, Judgment Day, which had just become the most successful movie and movie history. Which is also one of the best sequels ever made. Arguably better than the first one. Exactly.

So starting with 1984's Terminator, Schwarzenegger had just been on a run. He had become synonymous with the action genre, Commando, Running Man, Predator, Total Recall. Not only that, he'd done a couple comedies. He'd done twins with Danny DeVito and kindergarten cop. Which I love. I genuinely love kindergarten cop. I was telling David about it when we were watching it.

And I think the thing that people forget sometimes about Arnold Schwarzenegger is that he's very funny. Yeah, he can be very funny. He's funny in Terminator, too, also. So Schwarzenegger gets the script. He likes it. And he likes that it shoots in L.A., and then he wanted to leave his wife and children and his other family that will

later learn about. Oh, no. And he also likes that it would be a PG-13 rated film because he felt like he needed to soften his R-rated image, which is, I think, one of the reasons he did kindergarten comp. But he was a very savvy businessman, very, very savvy businessman. And so he knew he couldn't just sign onto the projects. And so the other project that he was really strongly considering was apparently called Sweet Tooth in which he played the Tooth Fairy.

And I believe this is the movie that later became a Dwayne the Rock Johnson movie after years of turnaround where he plays the tooth fairy. So, so that nothing ever dies in Hollywood. So Schwarzenegger invites Mark Canton and Peter Goober to his restaurant, where it likes that promoting the restaurant thing at the end of the film is very much pulled from real life. His restaurant's called Shotsie. It's in Santa Monica.

He treats them to lunch, tells them the script has great potential, lights a cigar, and says, it just, I don't know if it's executed professionally. And that's all he says, but they instantly get the hint. So they kick Steve Shore off the producer at Columbia. They kick him off the project. Mark Canton says he's going to produce it personally, which isn't normally his job. And then they reach out to Hollywood's hottest bad boy screenwriter, Shane Black, to do a rewrite of the script. And so if you notice, Shane Black is who Penn was parodying to write the script.

And then they hire Shane Black to do the rewrite of the parody of his own work. So Shane Black had written Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and he had also acted with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Predator, something that a lot of people don't know. He's in the beginning of the movie. He dies very quickly. So he knew Schwarzenegger. They paid him a million dollars to do a rewrite of the screenplay. And that began in February of 1992. That's without having Schwarzenegger signed on to the film. Also, worth calling out that Shane Black was famous for writing Lethal Weapon extremely young. Yeah, oh, he was like in his 20s when he did this, yeah. Early 20s. And he would be like, what, maybe not even 30 at this point? Yes, maybe pushing 30. He was right in that range. And Penn and Left were very young as well.

And so there's a great oral history of this project that I found online, and I want to read you a little back and force between these writers about how this kind of came together. So this is Zach Penn. They shifted the parody of the hero to much more of the Mel Gibson Bruce Willis archetype, wisecracking, angry down on his luck cop, which is a pretty enormous change and pretty much pervades every line of Arnold's dialogue. I think, frankly, that it hurts the movie tremendously because the whole point of the movie when we wrote it was the counterpoint between the kid who's smart and like us and the other character who's a fantasy character, who's an idiot, who's literally one-dimensional. Instead, the Arnold character in the final movie doesn't seem any less real than the kid's character. They both have backstories. It's just that Arnold lives in a separate world.

So there's a lot of disagreement between them on which version was better, who did a better job. What I would agree with is I think it would have been better if Schwarzenegger had been playing more of a Terminator type within the film. Because it felt weird. Him doing the like quick banter, Mel Gibson-y stuff, did feel really, like him doing Shane Black dialogue felt strange to me. And I think that that's a good point. It also, it's interesting when you brought up the fact that he had a backstory within the movie that didn't match the actual. character in the movie, that's where it got confusing. So there's a moment where, you know, Arnold has been this like tough talking, you know,

fast guy, all the women love him and he's, you know, like so amazing. And then he gets essentially fired and all of a sudden he brings the kid back to his apartment. And it's this like horrible apartment that like overlooks a freeway. And it's just all of a sudden the kid's like, what is this? And he's like, this is my real life. And it doesn't make any sense. So that's all Shane Black stuff. There was two different directions with the movie.

So when Zach Penn and Adam Left wrote it, my understanding is it was very much an escapist fantasy for a 12-year-old boy. He goes into a movie world and then he has to be taught that violence isn't the answer. Oh, that is not at all what you wind up with. David Arnott tried to do. And by the way, they weren't the last writers on it. We'll get to it. So Shane Black and David Arnaut, I actually like their idea for it a lot too. So in their original version, the boy's dad has just died.

And so his escape is going to watch action movies where the hero is his surrogate father. And in the movie franchise, the action heroes just lost his son. And so when... Which is what happens in the movie. But you're missing kind of the dead father, I feel like. And so when they come together in the movie, they find something real between themselves, but they can't exist in the same world at the end. And it's the pain of letting go.

And then their whole point was like, that whole scene with death from the seventh seal only makes sense if you know that the boy's dad has died and he tells death, no, you can't just take whoever you want. I'm tired of you. And in this current version without that backstory, it doesn't really make any sense. It didn't, yeah. Anyway, Shane Black comes on. He gives the movie a lot of funny jokes and the narrative's a little more cohesive, apparently. So Columbia is feeling excited about the rewrite and they start looking for an A-list director that'll really lock Arnold in for the ride.

They first went out to someone we've talked about before. I don't know. Paul Verhoven, who had directed, yes, yes, yes, indeed of showgirl's infamy. Please give that episode a listen if you haven't already. As well as, of course, Total Recall with Arnold, right? Exactly. So he had directed Arnold in Total Recall, but he proved unavailable. Eventually, they land on John McTiernan.

He'd done Die Hard, Hunt for Red October, and Predator, where he'd worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger before. So he was a big action movie director. Reads the first draft and he passes. Columbia then bugs and bugs and bugs and they send him Shane Black's version. He reads it and he's like, okay, I can dig this. And he calls Arnold and he's like, we should do this movie. But both McTiernan and Schwarzenegger still have some reservations about the script.

They want more bonding between the boy and Arnold. But the problem is Columbia is like quickly running into scheduling problems because they want the film to be their 1993 summer tent pole. And the production window to hit that release date is very quickly closing, We're already in like spring 1992. And so they need Schwarzenegger to sign a deal in order to greenlight the film, but he was not happy with the script. So they bring in another writer. And what writer gives people confidence?

Well, that's Oscar winning screenwriter, William Goldman, who did Butch Cassidy and the Sunance Kid, all the president's men, Marathon Man, the Princess Bride, to name a few. They just basically like harassed him to the point where he would agree to write on the movie. and so Arnold wanted it to feel like more of a family film and that's why William Goldman would be perfect to sweeten this movie. So you got a movie that's like, was written as a parody of a Shane Black script, and then you had Shane Black come on to rewrite that,

and now you're having William Goldman come on and rewrite Shane Black. Literally, William Goldman said that his job was removing fart jokes, was what he said, like when he, which, by the way, a lot of them stayed in the movie. So Goldman agrees to do a four-week rewrite of the property for which he was paid $750,000. Oh my God. It helps, but then a lot of the edge and the jokes that Schwarzenegger and McTernan actually liked were gone. So they brought Shane Black and David are not back onto the project to

rewrite that rewrite. To add in more far jokes. Yep. And then they later brought on three more screenwriters, including Larry Ferguson, who wrote The Hunt for the Red October, and Carrie Fisher was brought on as a script doctor to give it to soften the movie for female I don't know that Carrie's going to do that. No. So there was a rewrite page coordinator. His name was George Wang and he said, Last Action Hero was a perfect example of movie making by committee. It became everybody's version of the movie of what they thought the movie was about.

And the process became nobody's movie. Everyone was writing on it. Hell, I even think I threw a few pages in. So by the time production began, Columbia had spent over $3 million on the Last Section Hero script. In the end, the credited writers are Shane Black and David Arnaut. Zach Penn and Adam left are given a source. story by credit and that's it.

Schwarzenegger's apparently happy with the new draft, although during production they would try to hire Shane Black and David are not back onto the project and they said no because they didn't want to deal with it anymore. And so Schwarzenegger signs his deal. $15 million with various back-end participation. Yeah. Oh my God. And he was the highest paid star in the world at that point and an executive producer credit.

In addition, he was guaranteed input in all marketing and advertising, which was a very unusual responsibility to be given an actor at that time. McTiernan signs on, he's getting paid $5 million, and Kansen and Goober quickly realized this movie's going to cost a lot more than the $60 million that they told Sony it would. But Kansom's like, well, deeper into the crevasse to steal from 30 Rock. And he pulls together executives from across every division in Columbia. And in August of 1992, as they're about to go into production,

he tells them to get ready for the biggest movie event that Hollywood has ever seen. They haven't shot anything yet. They don't know if this is going to be good. They're going to release the soundtrack on the new Sony label, which was formerly CBS Records. They're going to create a series of Sony video games

around the Jack Slater character. They're going to use Sony's new digital audio release for the format of the film. It's just synergy, really, like Jack Donagie, you know, Six Sigma Syngy seems to be the world. This is feeling like Jack Donny he pulled this movie together for sure. Yeah, the trifection oven is what this movie was.

So they're going to be tie-ins with Mattel for action figures, a $20 million deal with Burger King, a big deal with Reebok with MTV. Arnold Schwarzenegger himself came to this meeting and told everyone, like, I want to be accessible to you. Like, come talk to me anytime you want. To be fair, he followed it up. So he and the marketing team start touring the town. They're telling anybody that will listen that this film was the ticket to

buy in 1993. In fact, they even had posters that were Arnold Schwarzenegger holding up a golden ticket that said, Last Action Hero, The Movie, 1993. They haven't shot anything yet. They also ignored the fact that summer 1993 was the highly anticipated release of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park. Yeah, which was a massively successful novel. Yeah. Also, from the guy who had broken box office records three times before, so no pressure. Then after a very, very brief, eight weeks of prep, all they could afford to get the shooting schedule in, they start filming on November 2nd, 1992. The full cast has multiple Oscar winners, F. Mary Abraham, Mercedes Rule, Anthony Quinn, the British stalwarts, Charles Dance, and Sir Ian McKellen in a brief cameo's death.

Tom Noonan cameos from Danny DeVito Sharon Stone for two seconds Little Richard John Claude Van Dam Tina Turner Tina Turner Chevy Chase was apparently somewhere at some point James Belushi dropping a really creepy line And of course Arnold's wife my favorite one Maria Shriver Her cameo was very good So the shoot schedules the last four months

And there was no doubt that they would need every single day of that schedule However any flexibility was eliminated when Mark Canton said publicly June 18th, 1993, that's our release date. So that is nine and a half months from start of shooting to delivery to the theater. Who boy. Not only that, guess what's releasing June 11th the week before? Jurassic Park. So filming underway, Sony executives are constantly hustling to Arnold Schwarzenegger's trailer to get his approval on marketing materials. They just keep telling each other like, this movie's going to be huge. Less than a month into shooting, they spent another $750,000 to make a trailer,

like a teaser to put in theaters that Christmas to get people hyped about the movie. They spent $500,000 to secure the rights to put the last action hero on NASA's first unmanned rocket, which ended up being delayed and eventually canceled, so it never did anything for the film whatsoever. They created that 75-foot balloon figure of Jack Slater with the shotgun in his hand to float down the streets of New York,

and they were using that for promotional materials. Schwarzenegger would appear on, MTV and other like talk outlets to talk up the movie constantly. And in the meantime, director John McTiernan is like stress out of his mind and starting to have some doubts about the project. So they're pushing through production. He barely has enough time to get what he needs. They're spending an insane amount of money.

And he's realizing that this movie's going to be a lot harder to edit and post than he thought because the tone is so weird. He's like, yeah. I don't know exactly where this is humor. where this is like absurdism, where we're in the real world, where we're in a fictional world. There's just a lot to wrap your head around. It's going to take a lot of time in the edit to really figure out. And so he started asking Columbia to push the release date.

And Arnold actually backed him up. Arnold was like, if John thinks we need it, let's move it to his credit. And Mark Kent was like, no. Because Mark Canton had made such a big deal about it. He knew that if they pushed the date, people would say, the movie's in trouble. and that could be the end of it for their projects. I will say of everybody in the movie, the person that I think manages to walk the weird line

of all of the sort of incongruous genres is Charles Dance. Oh, yeah. He totally gets the movie that he's playing in. Yeah, exactly. He's the only one where it's like he knows what's going on. He's great in every scene. He's so much fun to watch. His costume pieces in terms of like tribal tattoos on Charles Dance

did not make sense. Nope. But I loved it. He was great. Yeah. I was like, is this like a weird white, Maori hitman or something? Like it didn't make a lot of sense. So there was just to show how tired McTiernan was.

This is Austin O'Brien talking about a scene. He said, I do remember that the deeper in we got, John looked more tired, more haggard. He was great with me. When we got something right, he turned into a little kid and start jumping around. But there was one day when I got a sense of how under the gun he was. We built in New York Skyline inside the studio and I was hanging from a gargoyle wearing a harness. So this is at the end of the film. He's hanging from the gargoyle.

It was so tight that I literally couldn't breathe, but I was too nervous to say anything, and I passed out for a few seconds. People were cutting my clothes off, and it got kind of scary, but I do remember McTiernan coming up afterward and saying, in situations like these, I don't care what's happening, you tell me, and we'll fix it. Don't be afraid.

You haven't done anything wrong, but we cannot afford to stop shooting. And so, like, McTiernan was just clearly struggling, you know, as he was going through this, to the point where he was telling a kid, like, you know, we, uh, we need you to be honest with us, both for your safety and for the fact that if I stop rolling a camera, we're never going to finish this movie on time. Uh, yeah. So as I mentioned, they did try to bring Shane Black and David are not in late in the process of filming because the

movie was running over budget and over schedule and they weren't sure how the story was going to work. Anyway, on April 3rd, 1993, having run maybe two weeks over schedule, it's unclear. They rap production with an enormous rap party on the Sony lot. Everybody's hugging each other, except for McTurnon. And April 3rd, if you'll notice, is... Who's crying? Yeah, April 3rd, by the way, is 10 weeks until the scheduled release date. That's nuts. You can't. The DGA rules dictate the directors have 10 weeks to deliver a director's cut. This is 10 weeks to delivery to a theater. That's like multiple edits, then sound plus music, plus ADR, plus color correction, plus VFX. Like, it's absolutely insane.

And you'll have noticed, like, some of the VFX in this movie are pretty janky, and I think it's just a time constraint because they clearly had the money. Mark Canton, though, is so excited about this movie. He cannot wait to see how it's going to play with audiences. So he schedules an early test marketing showing for May 1st. Oh, my God. Four weeks after they wrapped filming. He hires a research firm to poll the audience. He rents a 1,000-seat theater in Lakewood, which is like just south of L.A.

and McTiernan politely said, I had great trepidation about showing the movie in that state. Schwarzenegger chimed in. I would say the movie was shown in the roughest form I've ever seen a movie screened.

So the audience included top executives from Columbia Pictures, Arnold, Mark Canton, and John McTiernan. The movie was 138 minutes long, so it was 10 minutes longer than what we saw, with incomplete VFX,

no ADR, almost no music, And so McTiernan said, like, a lot of it, we just dumped what we had from the camera into the edit and then just left it. Like, we didn't even have time to edit it. As they watched the movie within minutes, Mark Canton realizes, oh, my God, this movie's not going to be the huge success that I've told everybody that it's going to be. But Mark Canton doesn't give up that easily. He rushes out of the theater and he tells the research team that he spent a lot of money to hire to collect everybody's scorecards and shred them. Oh my God.

So he literally tells them to destroy any record of how people actually felt about the movie because he didn't want Schwarzenegger or McTiernan to find out how people felt about the movie because then they would demand more time to make it better. Which you should have given them. Correct, exactly. Now, Mark Canton truly believes that for every week they pushed from June 18th, it would cost some $10 million in box office receipts. I don't know if that's true, but that's what he said.

I don't know if that's true either because the thing I keep coming back to is like you're releasing one week behind Jurassic Park. Yeah, they need a distance from Jurassic Park. Yes, you're releasing at the worst possible time. Get yourself a month or more behind it so that people are at least they've seen it, you know, because they're going to go see Jurassic Park. So, of course, the trades find out that they've done a test screening. And so they call Columbia and they're like, how to go. And Columbia, instead of just lying, well, they lie in the wrong way. They say, actually, we didn't collect responses.

It was just for like verbal feedback. And so, of course, the trades are like, okay, that's bullshit. So obviously the responses must have been so bad. They're not telling us about it. So the LA Times runs an article about how this movie is going to be a flop. It's going to be like, you know, another heaven's gate, basically. And Columbia then threatens to sue them. They threatened to pull advertising from the paper.

Eventually both sides back down. But that showed other publications that there was blood in the water. And all of these papers started publishing, you know, this movie. movie that they've been telling us is going to be the greatest movie of all time, is in trouble, and they start getting a lot of really bad press. And so Columbia gets nervous, and they decide to fund more reshoots for the project, but they're still not pushing the release date. So the budget climbs to basically $100 million. And here's John McTiernan saying, you know, kind of how late the shooting went. Quote, including reshoots, they're worth only three weeks between the end of filming and the

movie being in theaters. Do you know the old joke? The editing department says to Cecil B. DeMille. The editors are dropping like flies and DeMille says, hire more flies. We were living like that. There are enormous sequences in the film that are literally how it came out of my camera. We cut the heads and tails off and that's the sequence. It wasn't edited at all. So they just scrambled to deliver the movie as quickly as humanly possible. And as a result, they made the release date and it premiered in Westwood, Los Angeles on a I believe Sunday, June 13th, that was like their big gala premiere, not the wide release. Sony spent another $500,000 on the premiere. They invited a bunch of celebrities. A lot of people declined to come because they thought the movie would flop and they didn't want to be associated with it. But they did invite 2,300 people.

Meanwhile, that weekend, Jurassic Park opens wide in North America to rave reviews and a record smashing $50 million in its first weekend at the box office. it would go on to make $920 million and be the highest grossing film of all time until true lies and then Titanic would come on and kick its ass. It should also be known that Jurassic Park only costs universal $63 million to make. Wow. So Jurassic Park costs less than this movie by about... Like 40 million less than this movie? Probably $40 million less. That's insane because the special effects in Jurassic Park to this day hold up.

Because they would spend so much time on Jurassic Park. And I think that that old mantra, you know, it can be cheap, it can be fast, and it can be good, pick two. And so unfortunately, Last Action Hero picked fast and expensive and not good somehow. They did not pick too. That's crazy, yeah, because like when you pointed out the special effects in Last Action Hero, there's a shot that's supposed to mimic ET where the kid like shoots off on a bike and then goes over some... after E.T. And it's like not good. Looks so much worse.

Yeah. Yeah. So to add to the humiliation for the Sony executives back in Japan, Universal was owned by Matsushita, which was a rival Japanese electronics giant. So like, it was kind of like you've brought shame upon your house like in Japan. Oh, no. This movie is not going to be good. However, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a consummate professional.

and here he is continuing to champion the movie at the premiere when he already knows it's a stinker. This film will be remembered that you can do action, adventure, and dramatic scenes like that with chase scenes and blow-ups and special effects without really making it hard R-rated and making it PG-13 so the kids can also go and see it. The whole family can go and see it. You don't need the explicit violence in order to determine.

tell a story and to make a great movie. I love Arnold. He's trying. I was just going to say, secret family aside, I love Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's great. I love how he promotes veganism now and he's been good during the pandemic. Yeah. So the advanced reviews start coming in for Last Action Hero and every one of them is just

an unneeded nail in its coffin. Variety. Last Action Hero is enough to make one nostalgic for Hudson Hawk. Hollywood Reporter. Oh, come on. A joyless, soulless machine of a movie. Nothing more than a noisy monstrosity. It turns out, it's supposed to be a movie within a movie.

It turns out it's a movie without a movie. I think all very unfair. Rude. Yeah, I agree. It's because everyone was so pissed at the hubris behind the makers of the film. So Last Action Hero debuts wide, June 18th, just as Mark Canton had proclaimed months and months. earlier in 2,400 theaters around the country.

It grosses $15.3 million its first weekend, which is just such a low number. The Columbia team tried to spin it. They said, quote, they were very, very happy with the box office numbers. But then in its second weekend, the movie dropped 47% in attendance. And the final blow that really must have hurt was that its second week, it was beat out by a newcomer to the box office, sleepless in Seattle, an unexpected rom-com hit that was being distributed by none other than TriStar Pictures, Columbia's sibling studio under the Sony name. So in the end, the movie grossed $120 million worldwide against a budget of nearly the exact same amount. Factoring in advertising and marketing, eventual ancillary sales, it's estimated to have lost around $26 million.

Arnold says they eventually made their money back, which I believe, like 26 million over time and VHS and DVD, sure. But the movie was a pretty big flop, especially for Schwarzenegger who had been huge and McTiernan, who'd had like three successful films in a row. The ripple effects were costly for Columbia. They had not really developed other properties because they'd put all of their energy into Last Action Heroes. They had a really weak slate for the following few years. McTiernan basically hold up in a cabin in Montana for 18 months and didn't make another movie for over two years until he was brought back on to make the next diehard sequel.

McTurin later went to jail for like illegally wiretapping a producer. So he's an odd guy. What? Yeah, we'll get into him on another episode. Schwarzenegger though was saved by his friend James Cameron because True Lies was already in pre-production. at that point in time. Mark Canton would stay with Columbia for a few more years.

There is a little sidebar story here. Right when the movie came out, Heidi Flyce, who, you know, is like the madame of the stars, she was in her 20s at the time, was arrested, like on charges of pandering, like prostitution, basically. Yeah, yeah. And narcotics possession, both of which are felonies. And while she was in holding for bail,

all of Hollywood freaked out that she would release her client list. in exchange for a deal. Apparently, many of her clients were executives at Columbia Pictures. And so Columbia Pictures was not only on a knife's edge because of the release of Last Action Hero, but also because they were all terrified they were going to get pulled down in a prostitution ring. There were also rumors that dogged the Last Action Hero release that Fleiss's sex workers had been brought on by Columbia as day players at extras on Last Action Hero. What?

Yeah. Schwarzenegger had pitched the movie as a family film. And so there are these rumors that a lot of the women in the scene where the car goes in through the, like, photo shoot early in the movie, that a lot of those women were sex workers that might have been sleeping with Columbia executives and had been paid through day player work on Last Action Hero. So there was like a real nerve-wracking moment where it's like, oh, my God, do we have like an embezzlement or like fraud issue where we're running,

prostitution money through the balance sheet of our biggest tent pole movie. Turns out they probably didn't have that. Yeah, I'd say that's a problem. Yeah. In the end, uh, that Columbia did their own in-house investigation. They fired a bunch of people, um, but they were never charged with anything. Uh, and last action hero, though, was doomed anyway. nominated for six Razzie awards in the end, which was near a record at the time. And then in 1994, less than five years after joining Columbia and becoming the president of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Peter Goober left his post. So $750 million for five years. And then Mark Canton left a few months later. That Goober. Yep. It was tough. So I want to end before we get into what went right and stuff with just a couple of quotes from

Zach Penn that I thought were very fun. So Zach Penn, who wrote the first two drafts of the script, co-wrote, who as I said, still works in Hollywood and is doing fine. He said, quote, We always thought it would be someone like Robert Zemeckis or John Landis directing, someone with a history of pulling genres apart. I like Shane and I like John McTiernan. I wouldn't have watched all their movies so many times if I didn't. But I do think it's easier for someone from the outside to mock the conventions of action movies than it is for the people who created them in the first place.

And I think that that's so accurate when you think about especially the movie really starts finding its footing only in the third act when it starts to get so messed. that it's just obvious to the audience what's happening. Because for a lot of it, it feels just like it's too conventionally, it's not wacky enough in a weird way. In the end, everybody involved in the project got more opportunities. This really wasn't a sad ending. I think what was sad for some people was that Schwarzenegger and McTiernan were actually both

proud of the movie and they both felt very strongly that if they'd had more time, they could have made a much better movie. Because, and I agree with them, I think there is a better movie in there. Do I think it's an amazing movie? No, but I think it's like just a much stronger, tighter, shorter version of this movie. That would have been even more fun. And I think it's better than Waterworld, don't you? For sure.

And it gets lumped in with that movie constantly. No, it's significantly better. This really was not a bad movie. No. So to all you just snarky bastards out there that shit on movies like this, hey, it's not that bad. It's not that bad. And guess what? when you're in a global pandemic and all you can do is watch movies, you're going to be glad that they made the last action hero because you are going to run out of Emily in Paris and then you're going to have to watch it.

And speaking of Emily and Paris, let's just get right into what went right. Because we all know that that is going, however you say right in French. So Lizzie, in your mind, what went right? As I said, the person that I thought sort of carried the movie the best was Charles Dance. And there was one. particular scene that genuinely made me laugh. So I will call that out as what went right, which is where he, the action movie villain has stepped out into the real world. And he's sort of testing the limits of when the police will show up. And he just like point blank murders a person in the street. And then there's just no cops. And he like can't figure out what's going on. And he starts saying like, hello, I have killed this man. Like someone come get me. I would like to confess. Yeah. And then someone just yells at him to shut up, like, in the street.

And that was so funny. He carried it so well. We needed more moments like that, because I agree. That movie, when you, they actually rift, it was more fun to have, this is what I would say. It was more fun to have action characters in the real world. Than it was to have a real person in the action world. A hundred percent. If it had gotten them into the real world faster, I think it would have been better.

I agree. So for my what went right, I have to say Arnold's willingness to make real world Arnold like kind of a douche was so funny. And I really thought it was a, he clearly has a sense of humor about himself that I thought, I just thought it was so fun. And I wanted more of that in the movie. At the end when he's like treating the action version of himself like he's a stunt. devil and he's like we can get you to do mall openings and like all this stuff i thought that was an absolute blast and i appreciated that he clearly unlike some action stars we know clearly doesn't take himself too seriously and uh i think honestly i think if they had hired bruce willis mel

gipson or sylvestre sloane they would not have done something like that and i thought that that was pretty fun that he was willing to get some jokes in at his own expense so that's my I agree. I agree. One final big what went right, well, for us at least, is that this is our 30th episode, which is very exciting. So we wanted to say a very quick thank you to everybody who has continued listening to us for 30 episodes.

That's a lot. And we appreciate it and keep sending us your suggestions because we need them. We do. Thank you guys, as Lizzie said, for listening. If you get a chance, leave us a rating and review. We've got one of my all-time favorite and potentially most disturbing movies coming up next week. So make sure you guys tune in. It's going to be disturbing. And that's it. Bye. Bye. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman

with cover art from Uthano Uos.