As he famously droned on-screen in his signature Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger is back.
He is still a worldwide star who resonates with action audiences around the world
A year after leaving the California Governor’s office and becoming tabloid fodder for fathering a boy with his family’s housekeeper and splitting with his wife, Maria Shriver, the 65-year-old former bodybuilder will star in no less than three Hollywood movies over the next 12 months.
None are likely to win Schwarzenegger an Oscar. Indeed, the films, and Schwarzenegger’s own fee, are low-budget compared with his global blockbusters of yore. But studio executives are betting that overseas fans especially will once again respond to a personality whose 24 films generated worldwide ticket sales of $3.9 billion (€2.9 billion), according to boxoffice.com.
“He is still a worldwide star who resonates with action audiences around the world,” said Rob Friedman, the co-chairman of the Lionsgate motion picture group, which is scheduled to release his next two films.
The Last Stand will open on January 18 and The Tomb in September.
Ten, the third film, is scheduled for release in January 2014 by Open Road Films, a joint venture of the AMC and Regal Theatre chains.
“When you have left the movie business for seven years, it’s kind of a scary thing to come back because you don’t know if you’re accepted or not,” Schwarzenegger said at a Saturday press event for The Last Stand.
“There could be a whole new generation of action stars that come up in the meantime.”
The actor said he was “very pleasantly surprised” by what he called a “great reaction” to his cameo in the 2010 action film The Expendables, which featured fellow action stars Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham. The film grossed $103.1 million (€79 million) in US ticket sales and $274.5 million (€210.5 million) worldwide.
Since then, Schwarzenegger appeared in a second Expendables and says he will join a fifth instalment of The Terminator if it is made.
Comcast’s Universal Pictures wants to “do a bunch” of new films based on the 30-year-old Conan the Barbarian movie, said Schwarzenegger, in which he would reprise his role as a barbarian.
He added that Universal, after 10 years of prodding by Schwarzenegger, also wants to do a sequel to the 1988 comedy Twins, in which he and Danny DeVito played mismatched twins, to be called Triplets.
Schwarzenegger no longer commands the $25 million (€19 milion) paycheque he cashed in his heyday and will get between $8 and $10 million (€6 to €7.6 million) for each of his next three films, according to two people unauthorised to speak publicly about it.
What audiences will see is an ageing star who isn’t afraid of showing his drooping muscles and widening paunch, or of making fun of being past his prime. In the The Last Stand, a less than rock hard Schwarzenegger plays a retired Los Angeles policeman who becomes the sheriff of a small border town and is then called on to stop a violent drug lord from crossing.
In Ten, he plays an ageing drug agent, and in The Tomb an older prison inmate. “The great thing in the movie is that they we’re not trying to play me as the 35-year-old action hero but the one who is about to retire, and all of a sudden there is this challenge where he really needs to get his act together,” said Schwarzenegger at The Last Stand press event.
The one-time muscle man compares his career metamorphosis to that of his friend Clint Eastwood, who transitioned from his Dirty Harry days to a wiser person who’s not afraid to make fun of his slipping abilities in recent films like Trouble with the Curve.
“That’s called evolution,” said Sylvester Stallone, who stars with Schwarzenegger as ageing inmates in The Tomb. “There are no more wooly mammoths. Things change, but the one thing you cannot replace is charisma. Certain people have it, and will have it until the day they die.”