Arnie Is A Smart Business Man

Rating: 7/10 (11 July 2016)

Continuing my plan to watch every Arnie movie in order, I come to Total Recall.
Plot In A Paragraph: in the future Doug Quaid (Arnie) is haunted by a recurring dream about being on Mars. He buys a holiday at Rekall Inc. where they sell implanted memories. But something goes wrong and he suddenly questions everyone he knows and everything he thinks is real.
Some of Arnies acting is awful here (see the scene where he first goes to Recall) it's not Raw Deal bad, but it's still bad, and the effects have not aged well at all, buy it's still very entertaining.
Michael Ironside and Ronny Cox make for entertaining villains, Sharon Stone (just shy of her infamous Basic Instinct role) is OK, as is Rachel Ticotin.
In his Autobiography, also named Total Recall, Arnie talks about how he always works better with a strong director, how this movie came about, and how it was almost a huge miss.
He always looks at the marketing data (tracking studies) from the studio which measures a movies buzz. Due to a poor trailer and weak TV spots (that just had it down as a routine action flick) three weeks away from release, hardly anyone knew it was coming out, and those that did, didn't care. The problem was Tri-Star and Colombia were being taken over by Sony, and we're all about to lose their jobs. So nobody cared, and they were willing to let the movie sink.
Arnie got in touch with someone at Sony, explaining "I have a one hundred and fifty million dollar movie here, and the trailer makes it look like a twenty million dollar picture." and arranged a meeting. He screened him Total Recall, then the trailer. Thankfully they agreed with him, and a marketing company was brought in to recut the trailer and handle promotion of the movie.
Following on from Twins, Total Recall was Arnie's second movie to Gross over $100 million at the Box Office ($119 million) and end the year amongst the Top 10 highest grossing movies of the year (7th) It actually grossed more (A new record for the oak) but finished the year lower than Twins.