Ash Ketchum

If they were smart, they'd have Vivica A. Fox play her character from "Empire." That would be a deal-maker for me.

P.S. Why all the hate for LAST ACTION HERO? That's a wonderful movie. The only Schwarzenegger movie (outside of EXPENDABLES 2) that I don't have mixed feelings about.

orangerunner

Ah shit, well I guess it had to happen sooner or later.

Hokeyboy

A failure, sure, but it was an ambitious and creatively daring failure. And I'll take that over formulaic mediocrity any day of the week.

Brack

A lot of it had to do with sequels not being very good and movies where there wasn't a high demand. I mean, did anyone really want to see City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold?

Seems that we forgot about the Mission:Impossible franchise, which is now over 20 years old. Or a 90s James Bond reboot with Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye, which pretty much brought the franchise back from the dead after a lackluster mid to late 80s. Toy Story had a great run. American Pie franchise started in 99, and had a good run as well. There were a lot of semi-successful films that got sequels that did more or less the same business as the originals, like Grumpy Old Men, Father of the Bride, etc.

But I don't remember seeing a decade with so many original movies making up the top ten or twenty that weren't filled with sequels. But it was also the last decade that created genuine movie stars, like Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Will Smith. Ashley Judd would probably count as well. Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robin Williams, Harrison Ford, and Clint Eastwood still could open movies or had equal or better successes than even earlier decades. Then the 2000s happened with all the book/superhero franchises coming out and the age of movie stardom dying.

Ky-Fi

I like Last Action Hero quite a bit. I think it got stuck in some between-genre limbo--it was a little too clever and satirical for people looking for a straight-on Schwarzenegger action movie, but it was still primarily aiming for that audience, and didn't offer much beyond that, IMO.

hanshotfirst1138

Apparently Zemeckis and Gale have been steadfast in their refusal to make any more or allow remkaes and feel like the trilogy should stand alone.

rw2516

I think it's problem is it's too family friendly. Doesn't have the adult darkness/meanness of Terminator, Total Recall or Predator, which people expected. Later films like Eraser, 6th Day and Collateral Damage also had the dark/mean vibe.
Last Action Hero is more like Jumanji or Night At The Museum.

Brack

The Jack Slater character and his world felt more like he was a one-man show of a Lethal Weapon movie. I don't think it belongs with Jumanji/Museum, considering the PG-13 nature of the film.

Jay G.

It's interesting because Lord of the Rings wasn't initially a "franchise," but the first film trilogy where all 3 films were made at once. It wasn't done before, and it hasn't been done since, excepting for The Hobbit.

Harry Potter was the start of building a film franchise by adapting a series of books, although excepting for the final 2-parter, WB never committed to more than one film at a time. The advantage these have is the built-in audience as well as the already constructed story arc, so there's not a temptation to milk the franchise forever (although there is the tendency to split the final book into 2).

The 90s did allow some franchises to carry on through it. Die Hard had arguably the best sequel in that decade. Star Trek managed to pass off the film series from original crew to Next Generation crew rather successfully that decade: it wasn't until the aughts that the franchise got put on hiatus until the reboot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Hard_(film_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(film_series)

Jay G.

Another note about novel adaptation franchises: While it's worked for Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, etc, there's a ton of potential "franchises" that never made it past the first film. The Golden Compass, The Seeker, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Vampire Academy, I Am Number Four, Eragon, The Spiderwick Chronicles, City Of Ember, etc.

http://www.avclub.com/article/not-ca...launch--221076

Hokeyboy

1999 alone had more great movies than probably all of the last five years, combined.

Ash Ketchum

Hmm...I only count five great movies from 1999:

GAMERA III (Japan)
THE MATRIX
POKEMON: THE FIRST MOVIE (Japan)
TENCHI FOREVER (Japan)
THREE KINGS

Although that's still more than the last five years.

coli

I hope this isn't off topic cause it sort of relates to the OP question, but I think the 90's is very underrated for quality movies simply because so many franchises died and they had to get creative.

I think of all of the slop movies that have come out in the last 15 years, and then I think of the 90's with movies like Pulp Fiction, Apollo 13, Braveheart, Titanic, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense, The Fugitive, Silence of the Lambs, Goodfellas, Heat, etc. Those are just movies that I'm thinking of off the top of my head as I'm sure I left many great ones off.

My point is that the horror movies were dead until Scream in 1996, so half of the decade was devoid with stupid horror movies. CGI was still in its infancy so you didn't start to get the dummy CGI summer blockbuster movies we get today til the late 90's. This left a void for some great movies that even came out in the summertime (Saving Private Ryan, Apollo 13, Braveheart) where you would only see them now at the end of the year.

Mabuse

1999 was an incredible year.

BrewCrew

The first movie I think of from 1999 is Phantom Menace but yes thinking about it more there are some of my favorites from many genres like Fight Club, Election, American Beauty, Matrix, Iron Giant, Office Space, Sixth Sense, Being John Malkovich, etc.

EddieMoney

The Insider

Brack

Big Daddy

DthRdrX

Well, I'll admit it. I loved Last Action Hero. It was a fun movie.

brayzie

I thought it was just really bad in execution. It's supposed to parody action films and Hollywood films in general and yet the character of Danny and other characters who live in the "real" world act just like film cliche's.

It wasn't too clever if they had to exaggerate things like the Sergeant having actual steam coming from his head or shattering the class in the office. I guess they had to though since the producers couldn't successfully portray the way real people think and act. Watching that trailer for Cobra in the other thread looks more like an apt parody of action films than Last Action Hero.

Brack

And that AC/DC song that was in that movie sucked.

UAIOE

The problem with "Last Action Hero" is that, when inside the movie, it is a fantastic satire of action movies. But it falls completely apart when they hit the real world.

Instead of going to the real world (and turning into the movie(s) they were making fun of), the issue for Danny should have been the threat of him being stuck in the movie if he didn't get out before the credits roll.

brayzie

That would have been interesting if Danny couldn't get out the film, and that could be part of the conflict, seeing if Danny could ever convince Jack that his world isn't real.

But I didn't like the world of Jack Slater. Using the movie's logic, if Danny is in Jack Slater IV, then we should NOT be seeing the T-1000 in that movie, nor should he see Sharon Stone's character from Basic Instinct. Seeing other film's characters in other unrelated action films was not a common occurrence during that era. And cop action films weren't known for having cartoon characters ala Roger Rabbit in them.

All the bad things about the 90s were evident in Last Action Hero.They were throwing in everything and the kitchen sink.

I was reading an interview with Scott Sanders, the director of Black Dynamite. He said their goal for that film was to make it just 10% more ridiculous than real blaxploitation movies, and it worked.

Last Action Hero though went way beyond that and was just throwing random crap in there to hit audiences over the head with "See, it's not real life!!"

writer106

lol about City Slickers II. I liked the first one just fine. There wasn't a need for a sequel.

Back in the 90s, studios also used sequels to further cash in on kids or family movies like Home Alone, Free Willy, and The Mighty Ducks. I actually liked Home Alone II. I think D2 The Mighty Ducks did the same as the original at the box office. It got panned by critics. D3 ended up being a DTV release.

I also remember the stories about Whoopi Goldberg not wanting to do Sister Act 2, but she ended up doing it so the studio would make the movie adaption of the musical Sarafina.

DRG

The biggest change of that era vs. now... it was much more of a 'movie star' driven box office scene versus today's property driven approach. In the 90s, people were lining up for Tom Hanks or Robin Williams or Jim Carrey or John Travolta or whoever... the stars *were* the franchises. And certain stars was periods of infallibility in terms of opening movies, where they were going to get great numbers regardless of how good or bad the movie was.

This started to shift somewhere in the 00s. Audiences seemed to become less loyal to specific actors and more invested in longer stories. Two of the key factors in the heavy shift to franchising since 2000 were Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. These were designed to be continuing stories from the get-go, with an endpoint. Audiences stuck with it because each movie building to something versus just remaking the original over and over. This mentality has continued to work with things like Hunger Games and the Marvel films (which may not have a set 'end date', but do have a direction to the overall storytelling).

Contrast this to the 90s, where the franchise mentality was mostly 'let's make another one'. Speed 2? Yikes. Home Alone 2? I admit I enjoy it, but it really has no storytelling purpose. The Lost World? I mean, really... Jurassic World is the first sequel in that franchise that actually does something slightly different with the concept versus just cut and pasting what we already saw in the first one. We still have that with things like Paul Blart Mall Cop 2, but generally those sorts of pointless sequels aren't impacting the box office like they used to.

Of course, even today we have things like Fast & Furious that seem to fit that old sequel model. But at least it feels like they continue to put effort into each release instead of simply coasting on the name, which is what I think killed many franchises in the 90s. Often it felt like sequels would overtly get progressively worse until they released something so bad audiences just bailed (Batman & Robin).

Matthew Chmiel

No, it didn't. I saw it in theaters as I did the first two.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/...ightyducks.htm

It ended up doing half the business of the first two, probably because it sucked.