Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Last Stand Starts on January 18, 2013

Casting News, News, Projects

We’ve been following the relaunching of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career since he left office in California, up to him picking The Last Stand as his comeback vehicle. Lionsgate has now set it on the calendar for Martin Luther King Jr. Weekend 2013. This is per Deadline, which broke the story.

Plot Summary: Schwarzenegger plays a cop who leaves the LAPD in disgrace and takes a job in a sleepy border town. There’s little action until when an escaped drug kingpin heads toward the toonlwn at 200 mph in a specially outfitted car with a hostage and a fierce army of gang member escorts. The cop is the only thing standing in the way of the kingpin making it back across the border to safety.

What does this mean? On the surface you’d think Arnold is playing it safe or the studio has no confidence in the project, as January is the dumping ground for bad films before a quick arrival onto DVD. If this is a big summer project and fails miserably he’s no longer Arnold Schwarzenegger, massive movie star. A flop in January doesn’t hrut him as much; you could blame it on the timing, that audiences are down because they expect everything to be bad at this point of the year.

But the winter is slowly becoming a place for bigger films to be released after the rush to get prestige pictures out; Avatar made a killing during the winter and had the same sort of effect on box office business that summer blockbuster would. And with a reasonable budget, rumored to be around $35 million, if the film clears $100 million domestically then Arnold’s still the same rock star figure he was when he walked away to be the Governor of California. Odds are he won’t have much competition in terms of new films, either, so he might have a golden opportunity to re-establish his drawing bonafides in one fell swoop.

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