“I cannot tell you how upset that I was,” he says in his Netflix docuseries.
“It hurts you.”
It opened with a meek $15.3 million at the domestic box office and $50 million worldwide.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in ‘Last Action Hero’.Columbia Pictures/Everett
“It hurts you.
It hurts your feelings.
It’s embarrassing.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in ‘True Lies’.Zade Rosenthal/20th Century Fox
James Cameron, who directed Schwarzenegger in theTerminatorfilms, recalls phoning the star the weekend after the movie opened.
“He sounded like he was in bed crying,” Cameron says.
“He took it as a deep blow to his brand.
I think it really shook him.”
“I said, ‘What are you gonna do?'”
“He said, ‘I’m just gonna hang out by myself.'”
Cameron says with a laugh, “That’s the only time I’ve ever heard him down.”
“I didn’t want to see anyone for a week,” Schwarzenegger adds.
“But you keep plodding along.
And my mother-in-law also said this all the time: ‘Let’s just move forward.’
It’s a great message.”
“Arnold’s bringing me a project that he believes in,” Cameron says.
“He’d never done that before.
I thought we could have fun with comedy.
I know he had done comedy.
He has a good sense of humor.”
Grossing $378 millionworldwide, the film was a box office success.
“It’s a play,” he adds.
“Life is a play.
You have to be able to take the failures with the successes.
And that’s just the way it is.”
All three episodes ofArnoldare streaming now on Netflix.
