Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Iconic 36-Year-Old Sci-Fi Was Supposed To Get a Sequel (It Became a Spielberg Hit Instead)

While one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best sci-fi movies was originally meant to receive a sequel, this Steven Spielberg movie ended up working better as a standalone effort. There are a lot of sci-fi movies that don’t live up to their books, but also a few choice titles in the genre that actually improve upon their original source material. For example, director Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 classic thriller adapted Philip K. Dick’s satirical short sci-fi story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” very loosely, and its changes were all welcome ones.

When Total Recall was released in 1990, the Schwarzenegger sci-fi movie scarcely resembled Dick’s original story. This was no bad thing, since the author’s original story was a slight, sweet tale about the trickiness of memory, sentimentality, and nostalgia, whereas Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger expanded on its basic premise to tell a far more complex, satirical story about AI, digital doubling, and imagined virtual realities that feel more real than real lives.

Minority Report Was Originally Intended To Be A Sequel to Total Recall

Total Recall accidentally became one of the most prescient sci-fi movies of the last 40 years by turning Dick’s original short story into a convoluted mystery where viewers could never quite tell what was real and what was part of the protagonist’s imagined “memories.” Later movies like The Matrix, ExistenZ, and Inception all borrowed from the playful, intelligent sci-fi thriller, so it is no surprise that a sequel to Total Recall was proposed at one stage.

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What is surprising is that this movie ended up becoming an entirely separate Steven Spielberg project. Minority Report was originally optioned in 1992, shortly after Total Recall’s 1990 release, as a potential sequel to Verhoeven’s hit with Schwarzenegger returning to the lead role of Douglas Quaid. When one of the production companies that owned the rights to the project filed for bankruptcy, it fell into development hell for years.

Like the later sci-fi story adaptation I Am Legend, Minority Report went through numerous incarnations with various different stars attached before the movie was finally produced in 2002. Directed by Steven Spielberg, Minority Report followed Tom Cruise’s Precrime police officer Chief John Anderton as he policed a 2054 Washington city’s citizens by detecting any evidence of their plans to commit crimes in the future. Psychics called ‘precogs’ assisted in this process, but all was not as it seemed in the Precrime division.

Minority Report Still Has A Strange Total Recall Franchise Connection

With a stellar supporting cast including Samantha Morton, Max Von Sydow, and Colin Farrell, Minority Report proved a critical success upon release. The movie was also a big box office hit, earning $358 million on a budget of only $102 million. Compared to Dick’s earliest movie adaptation, Blade Runner, Minority Report was a major success. Oddly, the movie also maintained an unlikely link to the Total Recall franchise despite Schwarzenegger’s early departure from the project.

A full decade after he appeared in a supporting role in Minority Report, Colin Farrell took over the role of Douglas Quaid from Schwarzenegger in 2012’s remake of the 1990 movie. Directed by Equilibrium’s Kurt Wimmer, this re-imagining also starred Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bokeem Woodbine, Bryan Cranston, and John Cho. Unlike the original movie and Minority Report, Wimmer’s remake wasn’t a big hit with critics, and Total Recall’s remake underperformed at the box office.