Taking risks can go wrong, and sometimes the disruptive models of an iconic series like The Simpsons at their best are taking a lot of risks. If not, ask Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Last Great Hero.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is without a doubt one of the great icons of world action cinema. While it is true that he had a waist strong enough to show his talent in various genres of cinema, the reality indicates that there was a film that came very close to destroying his career completely: The Last Great Hero. The reason? An idea that would have been inspired by something The Simpsons did.
By the early '90s, Arnold Schwarzenegger was at the peak of his career. Everything he touched turned into gold, having already starred in other hits such as Conan (1982 and 1984), the first two of Terminator (1984 and 1991), The Future Avenger (1990), Commando (1985), Predator (1987), Red Sonja (1985) and more.
It was then that, after showing his versatility in crossing various action genres, from Twins (1988) and A Detective in the Kindergarten (1990), in 1993 he received a proposal that followed similar guidelines.
It was The Last Great Hero, the result of a film that failed so much at the box office that it almost destroyed his reputation and that marked a before and after, not only within his career but also in the entire film genre action.
Adam Leff, one of the film's screenwriters, recalled a few years ago: “If you had seen an action movie in the 90s, you had seen them all: the themes and elements were constantly repeated, you knew everything that was going to happen from the beginning but We enjoyed them anyway.”
The story was about a boy who had found an escape from reality in action movies, knowing that in reality he was burdened by the death of his father and felt alone. There came Arnold Schwarzenegger, as that action hero who in the fantasy world was a balm of relief for the child.
But what is particular is how the scriptwriters took the method of The Simpsons to break the rules of a very classic genre. “The Simpsons inspired us. We thought, 'If this show can destroy genres even as it spans them, why can't we do it in live action?'" Leff added.
Maybe we shouldn't blame the script, because the truth is that, being something new for the time, like The Simpsons, which at its best in the early '90s had irreverent humor, and today - with the emergence of other similar series and the paradigm shift - many may consider it more naive, the formula could have turned out well.
So what was the underlying problem? The incredible string of bad decisions that followed, with constant changes to the script and the classic fight of egos in Hollywood, ended up destroying the very good intentions of the beginning to transform the final product into a failure. It ended up being a very confusing film.
Not even Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime could save the project, and in fact, few understood what the film was about. “I was having a drink with the director after filming until three in the morning in New York and he said to me, 'What we're really doing here is E.T.' When I heard that I had the feeling that we were making two different films, even though we had a child co-star in the film, it was not clear to me that he was family,” the star summarized, as part of how incomprehensible it all was.
Although a gem of historical cinema like Jurassic Park was also released on that date, deepening the crisis, The Last Great Hero received lapidary reviews and terrible comments from the audience. The studios lost about $25 million on the project, making it the biggest failure of the decade.
Arnold Schwarzenegger survived the wave, it is clear, and in fact, later came other successes within his repertoire. Examples such as True Lies, The Sixth Day, and more could easily be mentioned, although it is clear that the failure in 1993 will never be forgotten.
