Last Action Hero

• Franco Columbu's name appears during the opening credits as director of Jack Slater IV. Columbu was a fellow bodybuilder and a close friend of Schwarzenegger.
• Tina Turner appears at the climax of Jack Slater III as the mayor of Los Angeles.
• Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick appear outside the front door of LAPD as Catherine Tramell (from Basic Instinct) and the T-1000 (from Terminator 2: Judgment Day), respectively. Stone and Patrick had earlier co-starred with Schwarzenegger in Total Recall and Terminator 2, respectively.
• Mike Muscat, who played Moshier in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, appears as a cop in the LAPD headquarters. Muscat was also Edward Furlong's acting coach for Terminator 2.
• Sylvester Stallone as the Terminator is on a poster promoting Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This refers to Schwarzenegger's friendly rivalry with Stallone.
• Angie Everhart as a video store clerk
• During the premiere of Jack Slater IV in the real world, several celebrities appear as themselves. These include Schwarzenegger's then-wife Maria Shriver, Little Richard, Entertainment Tonight host Leeza Gibbons, Jim Belushi (who starred with Schwarzenegger in Red Heat), Damon Wayans, Chevy Chase and Jean-Claude Van Damme (who worked with John McTiernan on the Schwarzenegger film Predator as the original Predator before dropping out). Tom Noonan appears both as himself and the Ripper character in that sequence.
• As Jack and Danny enter the movie theater to find Arnold Schwarzenegger, MC Hammer asks Slater about a deal to do the Jack Slater V soundtrack.
• Wilson Phillips appears singing during the funeral scene
• Ian McKellen appears as Death, emerging via the ticket stub's magic from Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal (in which the role was originally played by Bengt Ekerot).
• Danny DeVito is the voice of Whiskers, the cartoon cat police detective. He and Schwarzenegger played twin brothers in 1988's Twins and co-starred again in 1994's Junior. DeVito was uncredited for the role.
• Joan Plowright is the English teacher who shows her class the 1948 film adaptation of Hamlet, which starred and was directed by Plowright's husband Laurence Olivier.

Last Action Hero was an original screenplay by Zak Penn and Adam Leff, meant to parody typical action-film screenplays of writers such as Shane Black. Penn noted himself that the studio ironically then had Black rewrite the script.[9] The original screenplay differs heavily from the finished film and is widely available to read online. Although it was still a parody of Hollywood action films, it was set almost entirely in the film world and focused largely on the futile cycle of violence displayed by the hero and the effect it had on people around him. Due to the radical changes, Penn and Leff were eventually credited with the story of the film, but not the screenplay, which is unusual for a film based on an original screenplay.

Several script doctors did uncredited work on the script, including Carrie Fisher, Larry Ferguson, and William Goldman.[10][11] Penn and Leff disliked various parts of the final film, including the idea of a magic golden ticket. In their draft, the story would not explain how Danny got transported into the film world.[12]

Schwarzenegger received a salary of $15 million for his role in the film.[13] Some scenes were filmed in a dome adjacent to the RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, California.[14][15]

Years after its release, the film was the subject of a scathing chapter called "How They Built The Bomb", in the Nancy Griffin book Hit and Run which detailed misadventures at Sony Pictures in the early to mid-1990s. Among the details presented in this chapter were:

• Universal moved Jurassic Park to June 11, 1993, well after Sony had decided on a June 18 release date for Last Action Hero.
• The movie was reportedly the first to have an advertisement placed on a space-going rocket.[16]
• The film was capsized by a wave of negative publicity after a rough cut of it was shown to a preview audience on May Day. Sony then destroyed the test cards and the word-of-mouth proved to be catastrophic for the film.
• The shooting and editing schedule were so demanding and so close to the June 18 release date that after the movie's disaster, a source close to the film said that they "shouldn't have had Siskel and Ebert telling us the movie is 10 minutes too long".
• Sony was even more humiliated the weekend after the film opened, when the movie lost 47% of its opening-weekend audience and had TriStar's Sleepless in Seattle open as the number-two movie at the box office.
• The final declared financial loss for the film was $26 million.
• Last Action Hero was the first film to be released using Sony Dynamic Digital Sound, but only a few theaters were set up for the new format, and many of those experienced technical problems with the new system. Insiders at Paramount reportedly referred to it as "Still Doesn't Do Shit".[17]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	link

The film was scored by composer Michael Kamen and peaked at No. 7 on The Billboard 200 chart.[20] The album, which was positively received by active rock radio outlets, was certified platinum on August 24, 1993.[21]

At the time of its release, the film was billed as "the next great summer action movie" and many movie insiders predicted it would be a huge blockbuster, especially following the success of Schwarzenegger's previous film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day.[22] The film premiered in Westwood, Los Angeles on June 13, 1993, and entered general release in the United States five days later.[1]

Last Action Hero was released on VHS by Columbia TriStar Home Video in early 1994, and on DVD on October 7, 1997. On February 3, 2009, Last Action Hero was reissued on DVD by Sony Pictures Entertainment in a double-feature set with the 1986 film Iron Eagle.[23] It was released on the high-definition Blu-ray Disc format on January 12, 2010. The Blu-ray release presented the film in its original widescreen format for the first time in the United States since the LaserDisc release. The film double-featured with Hudson Hawk on Blu-ray and released by Umbrella Entertainment on September 4, 2019 in Australia only.

The film grossed approximately $1.1 million in previews on the evening of Thursday, June 17, 1993 and opened at number two at the US box office, behind Jurassic Park's second weekend, grossing US$14.2 million on its opening weekend from 2,306 theaters.[24] It ended its run with $50,016,394 in the United States and Canada. The film was released in the United Kingdom on July 30, 1993 on 266 screens and again opened at number two behind Jurassic Park (on 435 screens) with a gross of £1.5 million for the week.[25] In France it opened at number one with a gross of 21 million French franc ($3.6 million) in its opening week.[26] It grossed $87,202,095 overseas, for a worldwide total of $137,298,489.[27] In an A&E biography of Schwarzenegger, the actor (who was also the film's executive producer) says that the film could have done better if not for bad timing, since it came out a week after Jurassic Park which went on to break box-office records as one of the top-grossing films of all time.

Schwarzenegger states that he tried to persuade his coproducers to postpone the film's June 18 release in the United States by four weeks, but they turned a deaf ear on the grounds that the film would have lost millions of dollars in revenue for every weekend of the summer it ended up missing, also fearing that delaying the release would create negative publicity. He told the authors of Hit And Run that while everyone involved with the production had given their best effort, their attempt to appeal to both action and comedy fans resulted in a film that appealed to neither audience and ultimately succumbed to heavy competition.[28][29][30][31]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 38% based on 48 reviews, with an average rating of 4.91/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Last Action Hero has most of the right ingredients for a big-budget action spoof, but its scattershot tone and uneven structure only add up to a confused, chaotic mess."[32] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 44 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[33] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.[34]

Roger Ebert gave the film 2.5 stars out of 4, writing that despite some entertaining moments, Last Action Hero "plays more like a bright idea than like a movie that was thought through. It doesn't evoke the mystery of the barrier between audience and screen the way Woody Allen did in The Purple Rose of Cairo, and a lot of the time it simply seems to be standing around commenting on itself."[35] Vincent Canby likened the film to "a two-hour 'Saturday Night Live' sketch" and called it "something of a mess, but a frequently enjoyable one".[36] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote: "Last Action Hero makes such a strenuous show of winking at the audience (and itself) that it seems to be celebrating nothing so much as its own awfulness. In a sense, the movie's incipient commercial failure completes it aesthetically."[37] Variety called it "a joyless, soulless machine of a movie, an $80 million-plus mishmash of fantasy, industry in-jokes, self-referential parody, film-buff gags and too-big action set-pieces."[38]

About the film's failure and critical response, John McTiernan said: "Initially, it was a wonderful Cinderella story with a nine-year-old boy. We had a pretty good script by Bill Goldman, charming. And this ludicrous hype machine got hold of it, and it got buried under bullshit. It was so overwhelmed with baggage. And then it was whipped out unedited, practically assembled right out of the camera. It was in the theater five or six weeks after I finished shooting. It was kamikaze, stupid, no good reason for it. And then to open the week after Jurassic Park--God! To get to the depth of bad judgment involved in that you'd need a snorkel."[39] Schwarzenegger blamed the film's poor performance on bad press and the election of a Democratic president, which he said influenced audiences to see 1980s action film stars as lowbrow. In 2017, he said streaming services gave the film its chance to reach new audiences unencumbered by the bad press.[40]

The film was nominated for six Golden Raspberry Awards: Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, Worst New Star (Austin O'Brien), and Worst Original Song ("Big Gun"), but it did not win any. At the 1993 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, the film received two nominations without wins: Worst Picture and Worst Actor (Schwarzenegger).[41] The film was also nominated for six Saturn Awards for Best Fantasy Film, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Performance by a Young Actor, Best Costume, and Best Special Effects.[42]