Coming across many people commenting on Last Action Hero and even articles on the subject all agreeing that its "failure" was because it was "ahead of its time" and audiences just didn't get it at the time, I think I need to rant about this, without trying to antagonize anyone.
First, a few examples of articles claiming it was "ahead of its time", usually because of its introduction of meta-humor and making fun at action movie tropes.
https://uproxx.com/movies/last-action-hero-2020-rewatch/
https://gamerant.com/last-action-hero-arnold-schwarzenegger-meta-action-comedy-ahead-of-its-time/
https://silverscreenanalysis.com/last-action-hero-1993-review/
https://screenrant.com/arnold-schwarzenegger-last-action-hero-deserve-more-love/
I think that suffices to prove I'm not just swinging at strawmen.
Meta humor and spoofs have been around since forever
A lot of the arguments for the "ahead of its time" claim is that audiences weren't ready yet for meta-humor and mocking the tropes of existing genres. To echo Colonel Hunter Gathers from The Venture Bros: the day the first movie finished production in Hollywood, the first movie spoof started production to mock movie tropes established by the first movie. This even goes back further than movie-making, I've heard some Greek theater plays in Ancient Greece made fun of Greek theater tropes. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream was built on meta-humor to make audiences laugh at the tropes of plays of the time.
Even looking just at the 20 years prior to the Last Action Hero, we see a lot of comedies built on spoofing established genres:
- Blazing Saddles, 1974, spoofed Westerns
- Airplane, 1980, spoofed disaster movies
- The Naked Gun, 1988, spoofed police drama/action movies
- Hot Shots, 1991, spoofed military action movies
I'm probably missing many here, this list is not exhaustive. So movie audiences were not unfamiliar with meta-humor or comedy at all, and many such movies had a lot of success.
The Action Movie genre LAH spoofed was not that old
There may not have been many movies that spoofed the specific action movie genre that Last Action Hero did before, but that's because it was really an 80s phenomenon that was really started and codified by the release of Commando and Rambo II, both in 1985, that set the tropes that became the genre. The unstoppable hero that shrugs off explosions and bullets, the focus on spectacle, fire fights and explosions, killing dozens of henchmen in every action scene, the one-liners, the paper-thin plot, the good guys always winning in the end, etc...
Sure there were elements of each in other movies (James Bond movies, for instance, which got their own spoofs way earlier), but the hyper-focus on mindless entertainment and spectacle was really established in the mid-80s. It then became a juggernaut of the late 80s, but by the early 90s, the juggernaut was tired and audiences were getting bored with it, with people craving something a bit more in addition to the action movie. The focus on action scenes remained, but to attract and keep people's attention, more needed to be done, whether it be drama, sci-fi... or comedy.
The Last Action Hero was perfectly on time
Far from being ahead of its time, the Last Action Hero is accompanied by many movies released in the same time frame that all added meta-humor and poked fun at the same action movie genre. 1993, the year LAH was released, also saw the release of:
- Hot Shots Part Deux, which was a direct spoof of Rambo II and like movies
- Loaded Weapon 1, a direct spoof of Lethal Weapons
- Demolition Man, another action movie by Stallone that tried to refresh the formula by being self-aware and poking fun at Action Movie tropes while offering its own take on it
So 1993 was actually a great year for any movie that tried to use meta-humor and poke fun at Action Movie tropes, and many movies actually did, some of them highly regarded today and viewed as major successes in their genre.
In fact, Schwarzenegger would hit big with True Lies in 1994, another action movie that included a bit of meta-humor and poked fun at its genre, though not as overtly as LAH.
And yet, Last Action Hero flopped, didn't it? Why did it? Or rather...
Did Last Action Hero actually flop?
People love denouncing blockbuster movies as flops, and when they do, they get tons of nomination for worst picture in events like the Razzies, because beating on the unpopular kid is a well-known pastime. But in many instances, these "flops" and "bombs" actually earn very respectable numbers. Take Waterworld, seen as a box office bomb even if it was the 10th highest grossing movie of 1995 and beat many movies that are seen as great successes.
So how did Last Action Hero actually do at the box office? Let's look only at the domestic American box office, it was the 23rd highest-grossing movie of the year and earned 50 million dollars. That's a respectable haul for 1993.
In comparison, the same year, Demolition Man did 58 million, Rookie of the Year did 52 million, Disney's the Three Musketeers did 48 million, The Nightmare Before Christmas did 50 million. All of these are considerate moderate to big box office successes, and certainly not flops.
So Last Action Hero actually did fine at the box office, what gave the impression it did worse than it did is that expectations were sky-high. Schwarzenegger was a huge star with Terminator 2 having done incredibly in 1991 and Arnold having no major release in 1992, people felt they were due for something big and special.
The budget for Last Action Hero was also massive. How massive? It was 20 million dollars higher than Jurassic Park's.
That massive.
And worst of all, it was released one week after Jurassic Park hit and became a cultural phenomenon, every kid at the time only spoke of dinosaurs. I know, I lived through it. And then comes this movie that is marketed as an action movie when it's a movie that spends more time spoofing action movies than being one. Many good movies have suffered from not meeting expectations set by their marketing campaigns, see Drive for example, an excellent movie that suffered from being sold as nonstop action by its marketing team, which it certainly was not, attracting the wrong audience and repelling the correct one.
Still, it did okay, not great, but okay, it did find its audience and a lot of people found it a fun movie. Sure, the critics gave it a mediocre reception, but that's not atypical for action movies of the kind spoofed by LAH. And quite frankly, as fun and entertaining as it is, did it really deserve to be one of the best movies of 1993? I think not, without giving anyone the background and the reputation of it, showing it to people and saying it was the 23rd highest grossing movie of 1993 would probably result in them saying "eh, about right", not "THAT low?" or "THAT high?".
Conclusion
So, did Last Action Hero flop because its mix of meta-humor and comedy with action was "ahead of its time" and misunderstood by 1993 audiences? Certainly not. 1993 audiences were just fine with meta-humor and got comedy just fine, thank you very much. People haven't gotten smarter since then, and though meta-humor has become more common, too common even, that's not because people didn't "get it". In fact, the movie didn't even do that badly and got decent interest from audiences that were getting a bit over the whole mindless action movie genre. It just didn't meet expectations set by its massive budget and its marketing campaign, and represented a huge step back for Arnold Schwarzenegger's career. But when you peak, you have only one way to go: down.
It's not just Last Action Hero, there's a trend of people that tend to explain the relative underperformance of past movies as them simply having been "ahead of their time", as if past audiences were somehow less sophisticated or less able to understand or enjoy the movies made at the time. Though it may occasionally be the case, in most instances movies that are ACTUALLY ahead of their time do great.
Star Wars was ahead of its time.
Jurassic Park was ahead of its time.
The Matrix was ahead of its time.
Terminator 2 was ahead of its time.
Movies that are ahead of their times usually do great. Movies that are and somehow fail or flop usually do so not because of an unsophisticated audience, but of poor marketing, unfortunate release timing or poor editing choices (looking at you, Blade Runner).