Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in the first-ever 100-million-dollar movie

Currently, a budget of 100 million dollars for a Hollywood blockbuster is not such a big thing, but 30 years ago it was an astounding record for the film industry. And the one responsible was none other than James Cameron, a filmmaker who has made several of the highest-grossing movies of all time. ‘True Lies’ had everything to succeed: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis as the main stars and a level of action rarely seen until now.

Schwarzenegger and his love affair with blockbusters

A few years before, the Cameron-Schwarzenegger duo gave us another blockbuster in the form of ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ (1991), a film that was very close to the $100 million budget even with some of the most revolutionary visual effects of the era. However, Cameron achieved an even greater investment for ‘True Lies’, giving the viewer an overwhelming visual spectacle; Not in vain, the film won the Guinness World Record of being the first film to exceed a budget of 100 million dollars.

“It’s just always been my policy never to discuss budgets. It’s a pointless exercise to review a movie in terms of its budgets. A film should be reviewed based on whether it’s successful at its stated goals. A film usually states its goals within the first act, and it either succeeds or fails based on what it’s trying to do - or based on what you want it to be doing, which are two different subjects,” commented James Cameron back in the day about the high budgets for his films.

Luckily for the careers of James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘True Lies’ was a box office success in 1994 thanks to revenue of about 378 million dollars, being completely profitable for the time, and only behind Disney’s animated classic ‘The Lion King’ and its 763 million dollars and ‘Forrest Gump’ by Robert Zemeckis with Tom Hanks and his 677 million dollars.