my impression is other than the expendable and terminator franchises, a lot of his stuff in the last 20 has been smaller, more anonymous films. I’ve seen several on Netflix. he’s done big budget stuff the last twenty years (expendables, terminator sequels, escape plan) but also several small films too.
even his quasi budget stuff like sabotage fails to break even.
was this a decision by Arnold to quit doing big budget films and focus on roles he enjoys, or more that his time in the sun as an A list actor is over (like Nicholas cage)?
some actors do a few big budget films then do smaller films for the love of the art. is that where Arnold is at with stuff like Maggie, aftermath, killing Gunther, etc?
But unlike Cage, Arnold isn’t drowning in debt as far as I know, so he probably isn’t doing these smaller, low budget, direct to video movies for the paycheck.
well he’s slowing down and other than vin diesel and the rock shoot/beat em action movies just aren’t a big thing anymore I mean all of segal’s movies in the last 20 years are straight to vid too and heck even the movie with van damme and Arnie together went straight to cable/video … in the 80s to mid-90s that would have been at least a 2-week #! blockbuster in theatres …
These two Forbes articles (both several years old) argue that:
Arnold had a series of big-budget flops, which may well have led to him getting fewer offers for big-budget roles (other than revivals of his old film series, like Terminator)
Both he and Stallone saw their stars dim at the same time, when the market for action movies moved away from “one big star” to “ensemble cast” (like Expendibles and Fast and Furious).
Plus, it’s harder to be a credible action star in one’s 60s and 70s.
I’m not sure about Arnold specifically, but it sounds like genre of movies called “Geezer Teasers”. A producer gets financing for a movie by hooking a big-name action star to the film. The producer gives a large part of the budget to the star who may just have a few lines in the movie. The big payday is just for the name recognition and promotional value rather than being an integral part of the film. For a lot of past-their-prime stars, it’s an easy payday. Stars like Nicholas Cage, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, etc. bring a lot of promotional value just by having their name and picture on the movie’s poster. It’s a formulaic process where a producer makes a by the numbers action movie with a big name star appearing for about 5 minutes. The movie is distributed world wide and on streaming to make a predictable profit.
He seems to be searching for a new niche. The Major Action Star ship has long sailed and he never really had the acting skill to plausibly do anything else. So, sad as it is, this is the extent of his options if he wants to still make movies.
I think his comedic chops are great too. Kindergarten Cop is an outrageously quoteable movie and Twins is great too. Jingle All the Way is also very enjoyable.
I’ve seen, “Maggie,” and thought it was exceptional. Arnold apparently hired an acting coach and IMHO it paid off. Hopefully, it will acquire a cult following.
A lot of these guys are also doing (or continuing to do) advertising. In the UK Bruce Willis is currently shilling some horrible energy drink with the catchphrase “Now This I Like!”, Schwarzenegger was pushing some wargame app, and Stallone gave us this hilarious ad for bread:
The current celeb spokesperson for Warburtons? George Clooney.
It’s a minimal amount of work for a quick paycheck, and the former view that doing advertising was a step down careerwise is no more.
Which is the well-beaten path taken by every single name talent in Hollywood to Japan to hold up a pack of Squid Mix and get paid a preposterous amount of money. As alluded to in Lost in Translation.
Fragrance ads are the big ones (at least in the UK): Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Keira Knightley, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, etc, etc - they’re all hawking big-name perfumes and colognes.
Roberts, Knightley, and Theron (as well as Johnny Depp) have all regularly appeared in fragrance ads in the U.S., as well.
There was, indeed, a stigma about big-name actors appearing in TV ads in the U.S. (though they would, indeed, often do so overseas), but that has largely gone away in recent years. Now, George Clooney does ads for Nespresso, Matthew McConnaughey does ads for Lincoln, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Garner, John Travolta, and Kevin Hart do ads for Capital One, etc. (We even had a thread about the topic here on Cafe Society a few months ago.)
In addition to changing tastes at the box office, Schwarzenegger’s politics (first as a Republican and then as a neverTrumper) and his marital infidelity likely lost him a decent sized chunk of the fan base he accrued in the 80s and ‘90s.
I don’t know as much about Arnold’s situation, but I saw an interview with Cage a couple years back. He certainly kept making movies in spite of their quality because he got into massive debt, but he’s supposedly been financially stable for many years now. He says the reason he still does basically a movie a year, sometimes more, is because he personally is a better person when he’s working. I’ve seen a few of Cage’s direct to video B-movies, most are terrible, but Cage is actually…turning in real performances in all of them, like for a B-movie actor he’s not phoning it in at all. I find his claim that he just enjoys the work plausible, and to be honest he wouldn’t remotely be the first person who maintains a better / healthier lifestyle when occupied with work vs left to his own devices. Arnie could be in that same boat…when Arnold came over to America for his body building career in the 1960s, he’s basically never stopped moving since. He was running a bricklaying business and a mail order supplements business at the same time he was a competitive body builder. He was a self-made millionaire before his first major movie role (Conan) from those efforts. I think the guy just probably likes to work.
What I think would be a neat idea is Arnie as Old King Sitting on the Throne Conan remembering his history, and find a decent look alike actor to play Younger Conan and run through the collection of Conan stories [there were a fair amount of them in the Golden Age pulp magazines] as a Game of Thrones sort of 2 or 3 season cable series/Netflix series/Amazon series.
