The less of the stupid kid the better

>>215101732

Emphasizing the kids shitty life was such a bizarre choice. Should've just been a film geek and used his knowledge to help Arnold navigate movie cliches.

>>215102577
Agreed, the movie was potentially excellent, it could still be very good with a re-edit and some AI scenes added in.

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According to picrel, the original movie was an indie project that was purchased by Hollywood and then given to a half dozen prominent screenwriters to polish but by the time actual shooting began they still didn't have a full script. Explains a lot, actually.

>>215103738

>The two screenwriters who had originated the project, Zak Penn and Adam Leff, weren’t Hollywood insiders but Connecticut university graduates who had been trying to drum up interest for their script about a giant rat in Central Park. With that failing to get a bite, they decided to channel their love of action movies into a story called Extremely Violent, in which a teenager gets sucked into one while watching it. “We rented every action movie we could think of and made a checklist,” recalls Penn. “ ‘Does the second-most-evil bad guy die before or after the most-evil bad guy? Does the hero have a Vietnam buddy?’ It was fun, although watching Steven Seagal movies one after another can be soul-crushing.” Extremely Violent would be an extremely violent celebration of the genre, while also deconstructing its many clichés. They named the second lead character, an invincible cop inside the film-within-the-film, Arno Slater—anhomage to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

>It was a wink, and nothing more, until suddenly a bidding war broke out between the Hollywood studios, and Schwarzenegger himself started taking interest. Remembers Penn: “We never thought we’d actually get Arnold. We were just two guys sitting in my apartment, thinking maybe someone would read it and get the reference. When we heard he wanted to do it, Adam and I looked at each other like, ‘This is insane.’ ”

>>215104111

>Things rapidly got even more so. Columbia Pictures enlisted Die Hard director John McTiernan to oversee the project. And Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black was parachuted in to rework the script, which Schwarzenegger had proclaimed “wasn’t executed professionally.” Penn and Leff were relegated to the sidelines, to watch as the people they had started off lampooning took over their script. And to marvel as the wheeze they had dreamed up while fast-forwarding through the dull bits in Marked for Death became not just solid but pumped up to a size that made even old-timers in Hollywood gasp.

>Schwarzenegger liked the idea because it reminded him of his childhood, sitting in an Austrian movie theater and wishing he could clamber up through the screen to join John Wayne. As in Terminator2, he would act opposite a kid, a chance to reassert his gentler side, something he sensed his fans wanted. Well, maybe not the teenage fans who came up to him on the street and asked him to say “Fuck you, asshole” (he always declined), but the rest of them. “The country is going in an anti-violence direction,” he said. “I think America has seen now enough of what violence has done in the cities.” Schwarzenegger himself was feeling more tender these days: he had recently wept while watching both Field of Dreams and MalcolmX.

>But gentleness, he knew, only got you so far. In Last Action Hero, the new title of his new movie, he would deliver more thundering spectacle than ever before. He and McTiernan and Black, three kings of carnage, would unite to dazzle the world.

>>215104136

>CONFIDENCE IN THE PROJECT couldn’t be higher, it seemed—Columbia chief Mark Canton was already referring to Last Action Hero as a “franchise.” But inside the team making it, cracks were already appearing. Shane Black initially had a great time playing around with the meta concept; in one scene of his draft, he had Jack Slater—Arno Slater no more—reach up, grab a scratch on the film, and stab a baddie with it. But he and writing partner David Arnott butted heads with McTiernan, and they, too, found themselves fired. A succession of other writers were paid astonishing amounts of money to fiddle with the story. Oscar-winner William Goldman was given $750,000 for four weeks’ work. Carrie Fisher and The Hunt for Red October’s Larry Ferguson also had a go. One industry wag cracked that the script had seen “more doctors than Cedars-Sinai.”

>“Back in those days, that kind of thing was an insurance policy for keeping your job at an executive level,” says Black. “A script would be questionable and the trembling executive would give it to a famous writer with a million bucks, so he could say, ‘Yeah, it’s fortified now. We’ve given it vitamins. Wait, wait, wait…It needs the woman’s touch. Give it to Carrie Fisher!’ It just made people breathe easier, throwing money at this enormous behemoth.”

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

the pinball table is super kino. one of the places down the road from me has one in really good condition.

>>215101732
Or if they hired a kid who could act. Most kid's are shit actors, but he was particularly bad.

>>215104175

>Propelled along by the mythic quality of its title, Last Action Hero was now not just an action movie. It was the ultimate action movie. The budget raced up and up and up; McTiernan grimly speculated that it would hit $125million. Wild marketing plans cooked up before the shoot had even begun included a $20million Burger King campaign, an AC/DC music video with a Schwarzenegger cameo, video games, and a $22 Mattel doll of Jack Slater that said, “Big mistake!” when you pressed a button.

>Columbia employees were praying they wouldn’t be saying the same words in six months’ time. “If this movie is a bust, we’re fucked,” said one, succinctly, to a reporter. Even Canton told the Los Angeles Times that summer 1993 was “the season that will make me or break me. This is the big one.” Right from the moment the cameras rolled in November 1992, that sense of weight, of sheer significance, bore down on all involved. “During the first week on set we kept screen-testing cars—Arnold and I would drive around in different vehicles, trying to find an iconic car for Slater,” says Austin O’Brien, who was cast as child sidekick Danny Madigan. “That was such a strange process. I also remember Slater’s boots being a really big deal.”

>Every detail was micromanaged, but the bigger picture was slipping away from McTiernan, who had captured magic on Die Hard but couldn’t figure out what his new movie actually was. “The head of the studio couldn’t decide whether this was an action movie or a kids’ movie,” the director recalls. “I was getting pushed in a lot of directions. When I was sent the script, the thing I liked was that it was wildly irreverent. But that was all getting watered down. And we were just trying to get the damn thing finished.”

Uh oh!

>>215104200
how bout i fuckin rape you, tough guy?

>>215104204

>From greenlight to release, they had just nine and a half months to pull Last Action Hero together. Often the days on set stretched to eighteen hours. And in postproduction, a desperate McTiernan invited Black to the edit suite to look at what he’d managed to cobble together: scenes involving robots, jokes about Sylvester Stallone, a cartoon cat voiced by Danny DeVito. “It was a mess,” remembers the writer. “There was a movie in there, struggling to emerge, which would have pleased me. But what they’d made was a jarring, random collection of scenes. The casting of the little boy was one of the absolute misfires of Western culture. Also, they rewrote every line of ours, and I don’t like the dialogue they wrote.”

>There was only so much that could be done. At a test screening on May1, one audience member commented that Last Action Hero “lay there like a big fried egg.” Upon reading the scorecards, a studio executive suggested that they should be set on fire.

Surely they would get it right at the eleventeenth hour??

>>215104204

>“They’re all a bunch of jealous bitches sitting around saying, ‘I hope he takes a dive,’ ” he said of those spreading negative vibes about the production, including those nicknaming it “Humpty Dumpty” (“All the reshoots and all the rewrites couldn’t put it back together again”). “What do you think I’m hearing about Spielberg’s picture?” Schwarzenegger confided. “The most hideous things.”


>“Spielberg’s picture” in summer 1993 was Jurassic Park, an adaptation of a science-fiction bestseller about dinosaurs resurrected in the modern world. It was the biggest competition Schwarzenegger faced, but neither he nor Mark Canton seemed to take it seriously, ignoring pleas from inside their camp to move the release date of their movie. “I rang [Canton] up and said, ‘I want to see Jurassic Park more than Last Action Hero, and Last Action Hero was my idea!’ ” says Penn with a laugh. But it would be weakness to retreat, and weakness could not be tolerated. “Sheer stupidity,” concludes McTiernan, who was plunged back into reshoots after the calamitous test screening. “The studio tried to set us against each other, which was an idiotic thing to do. Because we weren’t the greatest action movie of all time. We were never supposed to be.”

LastActionMoviebros... It can't just end like that, right??

>>215104310
Sounds like the Hollywooders couldn't wrap their heads around post-modernism (yet). Things either had to be straight-laced or pure parody like Hot Shots.

>>215104310

>The marketing drive was unprecedented, with a seventy-five-foot balloon of Schwarzenegger holding dynamite inflated in Times Square and $500,000 spent on launching a NASA rocket with the film’s name on its side. But again, everything went wrong: the balloon was hurriedly deflated when somebody remembered the recent truck bombing at the World Trade Center, while the rocket launch was ultimately delayed until well after the film’s release. And genuine hype stubbornly refused to build. The mood on the studio lot was compared by one employee to that of the Nixon White House in the last days of Watergate. “Columbia’s lady with the torch is sweating through her gossamer gown,” quipped gossip columnist Liz Smith.

>And the Last Action Hero premiere, when it finally happened, was even more despondent. Few stars turned up to support Schwarzenegger, and the movie’s various writers sat in a gloomy funk. “Everyone ate the food and drank the drink, and nobody said anything to each other about what they’d sat through,” says Shane Black. “It was like, ‘Don’t talk about the movie, but these are some really good fucking canapès.’ ”

OH NO NO NO BLACKNIGGER BROS HOW ARE WE TO COPE??

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All they had to do was copy pic related and make the majority of the movie a Arnold/Lethal Weapon cop parody

>>215104363

>It ended up taking $137million worldwide, not far off Demolition Man’s haul, but for this film it was a big disappointment. “Lizards Eat Arnold’s Lunch!” yelled a headline in Variety; Jurassic Park had made over $400million in the United States alone. For Schwarzenegger, tasting the unfamiliar tang of defeat, it was a miserable time. “To be rejected so soundly—it sort of broke his heart,” says McTiernan. Even more so than with Stallone and Demolition Man, it hadn’t just been his face on the poster—it was his image. And this salute to his many years as an action god had fallen flat. Stallone had feared Batman, but it was digital dinosaurs that had toppled Schwarzenegger, harbingers of a new era of cinema that looked to be leaving him behind.

Its... joever isn't it?

>>215104418

>“As always, I had the two voices battling inside my head,” he was to explain. “The one was saying, ‘Goddammit, oh my God, this is terrible.’ And the other was saying, ‘Now let’s see what you are made of, Arnold. Let’s see how ballsy you are. How strong are your nerves? How thick is your skin? Let’s see if you can drive around in your convertible with the top down and smile at people, knowing that they know that you just came out with a fucking stinker. Let’s see if you can do that.’ ”

>Like the Terminator’s lip curling into an approximation of a grin, Schwarzenegger forced a smile each time. His skin was thick. His nerves were strong. His balls were enormous. The man who liked to say “I’ll be back” was built for thundering returns. So he lit another Romeo y Julieta cigar and called his friend Jim.

>A few months later, on the set of James Cameron’s True Lies, that smile was back, real, and bigger than ever. Schwarzenegger had implemented a rule with the stunt team: whenever someone made a mistake, that person would have to put a loop of rope around their neck, a big rawhide bone dangling from it, and bark like a dog. The practical joke stuck, and as the production traveled around the United States—the Florida Keys, Downtown LA, Rhode Island—the sound of barking went with it. Then the day arrived to shoot a fight in a public bathroom, as terrorists attempt to machine-gun Schwarzenegger’s character, Harry Tasker.

Arnoldbros... WE'RE BACK!

>>215104200
I blame the hyper focus-tested writing a little bit more than the actor

>>215102577
why is it a bizarre choice, the target audience is an entire generation of little boys 'raised' by single mothers or at best disinterested and inattentive boomer fathers. These are the kind of kids that would love to have a real life action figure swoop in and pay some attention to them.

>>215101198

Last Action Hero's problems have less to do with any failings of its own and more to do with changing tastes of the time (it's a very 80's action movie in the early 90's) as well as it being released at the same time as Jurassic park

Arnold only had one huge hit left in him at that point after which he too fell out of favor because of changing tastes.

>>215104512

I guess that the principal idea was to show that escapism in movies is unhealthy, but the kid's life is such a shitshow (the VERY WHITE junkie breaking into his apartment and complaining there's nothing worth stealing) it actively shifts the film's focus from '''haha 80s action cliches'' to ''real life fucking sucks for most people, doesn't it? THIS POST WAS MADE BY HOLLYWOOD BILLIONAIRE GANG"

It's jarring and the whole 3rd act is depressing as fuck.

Is it still worth a watch anons? Only Arnold I haven't seen minus that one comedy from around the same time

>>215104689
Definitely. It's a mess but an endearing one imo.

>>215104689

Sure, it's mid tier Arnold, so pretty good

>>215101732
This desu
Kid drags the movie down, and they don't go nearly as far with the "Movies invading reality and crossing over" gimmick in the third act as they should have. They seemingly only did it to have a pointless Seventh Seal reference

>>215104689

It's pretty damn good, but watch out for the tonal whiplash. Strange film, it could have been one of the all time greats, but... just read the thread.

Not gonna lie, the Mo Zart joke lives in my head rent free to this day.

>>215104689
it's absolute kino. it features the famous comedian Arnold Braunschleiger

>>215104756
Yeah I still think about that from time to time as well
>>215104775
and that as well lol

Funny how high the standards were back then, with so many historic movies coming practically every two months, that an amazing movie like this was judged so harshly. Meanwhile we haven't had a single good action movie for the past 10 years since Mad Max. If Last Action Hero came out today it would make a billion.

>>215104583
Action movies remained major hits through the end of the 1990s. The main difference between the 80s and 90s was that lead characters became more grounded and vulnerable (Die Hard, Speed, Cliffhanger, The Rock, Independence Day, The Matrix etc). Maybe Arnold was overexposed, or maybe he didn't want the down-to-earth roles that were carrying action movies then. I just think he miscalculated his career after the 80s

>>215104689
It's a mix of fucking amazing (anything with Arnold and Charles Dance) and annoying (anything with the kid in the real world)

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>>215101732

This. It would be better film if a piano fell on the kid's head right at the start. Then Schwarzenegger arrives and guns down the creepy old pedophile who gave the kid the magical bullshit ticket.

>>215104892
I suspect there are a lot of commercial OR critical flop of back then that when rewatched now are actually not so bad.
They might not be a Blade Runner in disguise but not the disaster they were seen as back then.
Like say Clooney's The peacemaker, or recently I watched Mannequin, I expected some kind of disaster but it was a pretty cute romcom that I feel like I could easily defend and that even Roger Ebert didn't understand, as if he had a axe to grind with it.

>>215105152
>Mannequin
Someone started a thread about this movie the other day; am I in a thread with bots or is this perfectly organic ?

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>>215105321
I made that thread, I heard the Starship song in Naked Gun, I got the feeling to listen to it again, found out about the movie, watched it and then made a thread.

>>215105152
Much of the issue with LAH is the behind the scenes drama. So it ends up being like Waterworld or 13th Warrior. None of terrible movies, there was just too much baggage for them to get a fair shake.

I also think to some degree people weren't really ready for deconstruction.

>>215101198
They did that in Stay Tuned though

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>>215101198
pinballmap.com

It is 2025. You have still not obeyed my command to seek out the LAH pin and play it.

>>215105839
I actually like all 3 of those and am baffled by 13th warrior being a flop, hell I would rewatch it, if I didn't have to download it and round up people.
>I also think to some degree people weren't really ready for deconstruction
To think that just 4 years later would come out Austin Power making fun of what were considered serious bond conventions.

>>215104689
Op here, i watched it because i wpuld see threads of it from time to time but never entered such threads because i dodnt want spoiled

Its a complete mess, there WAS potential for a great movie, but it was pulled this way and that from writers, executives, and not committing to either being a kiddie comedy or a violent action movie, and as i said in my original post it couldve been redeemed if only it had a really cool final act of entering other famous movie worlds or bringing those characters into the real world, and all we get is magneto playing death for a scene…it really couldve contended with jurrasic park otherwise

Its absolute wasted potential but feel free to watch to satisy your curiousity as i did

>>215101198
howd you know im watchin this flick
kid is annoying AF

>>215106477
i play it all the time
>>215104185
that's me. i'm friends with the guy who owns them. TAH is one of the better 90s pins. Built by Data East (later bought out by Sega). great components. fun playfield. absolute kino. wish it had more voice bits tho.

Despite nothing working as intended, the film still works somehow. Not saying it's good but it's still entertaining and charming in a gaudy way.

>>215106477
Hey I played this at the pinball museum in roanoke va

>>215104583
>It's jarring and the whole 3rd act is depressing as fuck.

This. It loses the fun. Whenever I rewatch this after a few years, im like why dont I like it this is fun? But then they third act comes and the movie drags to a halt and I remember why I dont like the movie so much.

Also Jack Slater's kid son dying in front of him seems like to dark of a thing to happen since Jack Slater movies seem like they were supposed to be pretty campy and lighthearted action flicks.

>>215101732
It should have been a girl. Then I would have been all for it.

>>215101198
Not watching this shit again unless all of the kid's lines are edited out
Nigga makes John Connor in T2 bearable

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>>215101198
Lazt Action Hero ? More like Last Action Sub Zero!

>>215106692
Scream really ushered in serious use of conventions which is what I think LAH was going for. Austin Powers is a parody so it would work in any era.

>>215101198
I would love to see more of the world Jack Slater lives in. The final act is a week point but overall this movie is so much better than True Lies which is doing the same thing but less cool.

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>>215101198
Stallone mogged the shit out of Fagnold in 1993

>>215110438
Freddy's new nightmare predates scream, and it handled meta concepts perfectly

>>215101198
>It shouldve had jack slater chasing benedict across all the various film genre worlds, horror, romantic comedy, teen movie, black and white, sci fi or at the very least a final showdown where benedict made good on his promise to assemble a league of villians from all these genres
This is dumb. The film's title is Last ACTION Hero, why would you introduce other film genre worlds? And how would a romantic comedy or teen movie villain even pose a threat to fucking Arnold?

>>215111356
this movie is so corny
i rewatched recently
i used to think it was better

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>>215111446
>why would you introduce other film genre worlds?
Like Shakespeare?

>>215111969
The point of that scene was that Hamlet was the first action hero though.

Last Action Hero is already 10/10

>>215111969
NOT TO BE

>>215111358
Not exactly the same concept, anon. That kind of meta had been done numerous times, especially on TV.

The idea of using tropes as tropes in a serious manner is a much harder line to walk. I'd say it's why so many don't care for the tonal shifts in LAH. It shifts from comedy to serious, arguably too quickly.