Arnold Schwarzenegger Says He Got Paid ‘Nothing’ for ‘Twins’ Because No One Wanted Him in a Comedy
Back in the days when movies could still become huge box office successes because two of the stars looked funny while standing side-by-side on a poster, we got Ivan Reitman’s Twins starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. It’s still one of the most beloved comedies of the ‘80s, or at least once you look past all of that creepy eugenics stuff.
But Twins had a tough time getting the green light from a studio. Why? Because the director wanted to hire one of the biggest movie stars in the world, who wasn’t exactly known for being funny. Which is hard to even imagine in today’s post-Jingle All the Way world.
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In the most recent installment of Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Schwarzenegger appeared alongside his son, The White Lotus star Patrick Schwarzenegger. And of course this arrangement led to an awkward moment in which the Total Recall star recalled seeing his son’s “weenie” on HBO, and then compared it to his past dong-out Terminator scenes.
At one point, while discussing career pivots, Patrick brought up Twins, recalling how his father once mentioned that he was “paid nothing” for the movie. The elder Schwarzenegger recounted how, prior to Twins, every time a filmmaker tried to cast him in a comedy, studio executives responded by saying, “In a comedy? Are you crazy? You know how much money we make with him as an action star? The more people that this guy kills on the screen the more money we make! Why would we change that?”
“That was the dialogue until Ivan Reitman came along,” Schwarzenegger continued, “and Danny DeVito, and they said ‘No, Arnold is funny. We would like to do the movie Twins with him.’”
But, again, execs were unconvinced that they should cast the guy from Commando and Conan the Barbarian in a light comedy. So Schwarzenegger proposed an idea to his co-stars. “Why don’t we all three, we take no money. None,” he told Reitman and DeVito. “We all agreed, and we went to the studio and said, ‘Look, if we don’t take any salaries, we can shoot the movie (for) $16.5 million.’”
In exchange for waiving their fees, the three collaborators would “get 40 percent of the backend of the movie.”
The gamble worked out very well for Schwarzenegger, Reitman and DeVito. “Everyone was smiling all the way to the bank,” Schwarzenegger explained, because the movie was a massive hit and “made over $250 million worldwide.” It was the fifth biggest movie at the worldwide box office in 1988, beating out Die Hard, Beetlejuice and Crocodile Dundee II.
Hopefully the three of them didn’t try to make the same deal for 1994’s Junior.
