Arnold Schwarzenegger Hated the First Trailer for Total Recall

Total Recall turns 30 this year, so the film’s cast and crew have been reminiscing about the Arnold Schwarzenegger-led action/sci-fi movie. Recently, the movie’s director, Paul Verhoeven, revealed that he wanted one infamous character to look even more extreme. While speaking with The Ringer, Schwarzenegger talked about the movie and revealed that he was very unhappy with its original trailer, which he felt “cheapened” the film.

“It looks like a $20 million movie in this trailer,” Schwarzenegger remembers thinking. “It’s like a $50 million movie. Which in those days is a huge budget.” Not wanting the trailer to ruin the movie’s chances, the actor reached out to Sony’s studio head, Peter Guber, which owned TriStar Pictures. “I said to Peter—I knew him well—’Peter, you’ve got to help me with this,’” Schwarzenegger recalled. “I know you’ve got your hands full now taking over a studio and all this, but here’s a movie where you guys could make a lot of money. And I said, ‘They’re not really getting what the story is and how to sell it.’”

They ended up hiring Cimarron/Bacon/O’Brien to cut a new trailer for Total Recall. The firm had worked on trailers for many successful films, including The Terminator, The Empire Strikes Back, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The new trailer ended up showcasing the movie in a much better light. You can check it out in the video above or by clicking here. Unsurprisingly, interest in the film went up. Schwarzenegger remembered hearing good things about the trailer from Joel Silver, who produced the Lethal Weapon films as well as Die Hard, The Matrix, and more. “Joel Silver always has good taste with these kinds of things,” Schwarzenegger added.

Back in March, Schwarzenegger sent a message to fans about the coronavirus pandemic. “Stay at home as much as possible. Listen to the experts, ignore the morons (foreheads). We will get through this together,” he wrote on Twitter.

When Terminator: Dark Fate came out last year, the actor also talked about his iconic line, “I’ll be back,” and revealed he never expected it to become such a phenomenon. “I’ve learned very quickly with the ‘I’ll be back’ line. We never thought that this would ever be repeated,” Schwarzenegger explained. “No one even thought twice about that line. All of a sudden, when the movie comes out, people come up to me and say, ‘Can you say this line? I’ll be back. Oh my God, it’s such a great line.’ So, I don’t know, like when I said I’ll stick around and put the knife through someone’s chest… Or like, it’s another tumor, it’s not a tumor at all. It’s the way I pronounce words that makes these iconic lines because people have fun repeating it with that accent.”