The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 1993
Columbia opened Last Action Hero one week after Jurassic Park, and lost $26M
Schwarzenegger's $85M meta-action film made $137M worldwide, but the timing against 1993's biggest blockbuster still left the studio in the red.
Columbia Pictures · 1993-06-18
What happened
Columbia Pictures produced Last Action Hero, a self-aware meta-action comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger fresh off Terminator 2, on a budget of about $85 million, betting his box office track record would carry an unconventional, genre-satirizing concept.
The studio scheduled the release for June 18, 1993 — exactly one week after Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park had opened to record-breaking numbers and dominated theaters, a timing decision that put Last Action Hero in direct competition with the biggest cultural event of the summer.
The film opened to a soft $15.3 million weekend and closed with $137.3 million worldwide — a respectable-looking number that still represented an estimated $26 million loss once the full production and marketing costs were counted, and a significant blow to Schwarzenegger's box office standing.
Why it happened
- Release scheduling put an unconventional, harder-to-market concept directly against the summer's biggest blockbuster instead of finding clearer air.
- The studio bet the star's track record alone would overcome a genre-bending premise that needed careful audience positioning.
- Marketing struggled to explain the film's self-aware concept to mainstream audiences already primed for straightforward action.
- Nobody adjusted the release date even as Jurassic Park's early buzz signaled it would dominate the same weeks.
The lesson
A star's track record can't fix a release date scheduled directly against the biggest film of the year.
Aftermath
Last Action Hero became a standard cautionary example in release-scheduling discussions, and it damaged Schwarzenegger's standing as an automatic box office draw after a run of hits.
Sources
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