It seems like he’ll appear in anything for a buck, why not this particular franchise?
Actually, Arnold *wouldn’t *appear in anything for a buck - he was pretty good at managing his career, at least until the mid-1990s. He was particularly good in picking good directors to work with (IMHO, the real reason he became such a big star).
Arnold did not appear in movies during his tenure as Governator. That doesn’t explain Predator 2, but it does the rest of the movies.
Well, Predator 2 was released in November of 1990 and presumably filmed in the summer of 1990. That year, Schwarzenegger was in Total Recall and Kindergarten Cop and may have been caught up in pre-production for Terminator 2 (released July 1991) so maybe he was busy.
Overall, he’s got more hits than misses, I figure, at least through 1994. After that, with the exception of T3, his film career slid quite a bit and I’m not sure Predator sequels would have helped. Also, I doubt he had any trouble paying the mortgage.
How would he have fit in Predator 2? They would have had to completely rewrite the movie to make him the main character - what are the odds he would have become a Los Angeles detective after his adventures in the unnamed South American jungle?
And giving him anything other than the main part wouldn’t have worked either. You needed a psycho like Busey to play the Predator hunter.
At a guess I would say they wrote the script knowing that Arnold wouldn’t be in it.
It wouldn’t have been hard to bang something out to include him. Just have the Predators mark him as the ‘ultimate’ prey having defeated one of their kind already. They could have set it pretty much anywhere.
In fact I can picture it now. Arnold hiding out in a frozen wasteland being informed that ‘something’ was killing off his former friends and buddies from the army. Him reluctantly agreeing to go back into service one last time…shudder
Can the Predator kidnap his daughter, just to give him more motivation?
Or enslave him to an over sized coffee grinder.
If I remember the novelization correctly, the main character (or his partner) is Dutch’s brother and Dutch had returned to the jungle and was never heard from.
It probably could have been a fairly simple re-write, even if you insisted on keeping the story in L.A. This big human-skinning creature with a cloaking device is stalking the city and the cops are powerless to stop it. The DOD gets involved and calls out of retirement the one guy who is known to have defeated such a foe. In fact, I think that’s pretty close to the original story the producers had in mind before Arnold opted out.
Must have been an adopted brother.
Per wikipedia:
According to the same Wiki article, Arnold’s character was rewritten into that of Gary Busy, not Danny Glover. It sounds like the flick had a fascinating (or horrifying) pre-production process.
Other than the Terminator series, has he ever been in a sequel? (To a movie he’s appeared in, I mean. Sure Batman and Robin was a sequel, but he wasn’t in the first 3)
ETA: Oh yeah, he was in both Conans… doh!
3 actually, he had the same role in Red Sonja. I dunno why they titled it Red Sonja, they should have just called it: Conan 3: featuring Red Sonja.
That happened, but it was an entirely different kind of predator.
He didn’t play Conan in that one. He was some dude named Kalidor or something.
I heard that was because a different company owned the rights to Red Sonja. I don;t know if ti was true though. But they wanted him to be Conan in it, but couldn’t.
The Predator set off a nuke when he was mortally wounded. Ahnold’s character is probably nursing a toomah from the radiation.
It’s not a toomah!