Arnold Schwarzenegger Earned $25 Million To Star In A Forgotten Sci-Fi Flop

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a screen legend, but it's well-known the Austrian star has more than a few duds to his name. The man even has a dreaded zero-percenter on Rotten Tomatoes, though it is for a 1979 film in which he played "handsome stranger," so it doesn't really count. What's more, according to Rotten Tomatoes, Arnie starred in one of two "perfect" sci-fi movies with "The Terminator," giving the action star a full 100% score to balance things out.

In between those two movies, however, is a wildly uneven filmography that features everything from unimpeachable classics like "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and "Total Recall" to out and out failures like "Batman & Robin" — the set for which became chaos thanks in large part to Arnie – and a 1999 movie called "End of Days," which Newsweek's David Ansen called a "lurid, FX-happy thriller" which "slams pieces of a dozen other movies into a noxious new compound." 

Unhappily, Schwarzenegger would return to the big screen just one year after "End of Days" in yet another action thriller which similarly slammed pieces of other movies into an ungodly concatenation of well-worn sci-fi tropes from much better Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. All of which would be somewhat forgivable for the former Mr. Freeze if that movie had made any money. (It didn't.)

The film was "The 6th Day," the year was 2000, and the response was bad. Not only did Roger Spottiswoode's sci-fi actioner fail to make a profit, it was derided by critics who weren't much kinder to the film than Ansen was to "End of Days."

After delivering a solid 19th installment in the 007 saga with "Tomorrow Never Dies" in 1997, Canadian-British director Roger Spottiswoode turned his attention to the Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring sci-fi action project, "The 6th Day." But while "Tomorrow Never Dies" was received well-enough upon its debut, Spottiswoode's follow-up was not.

In the film set in the near-future, Schwarzenegger starred as charter pilot Adam Gibson, who undergoes what he believes to be a drug test ahead of a job, only to return to home to find he has been illegally cloned by a dodgy tech company. The company then hunts Gibson down in order to keep their illicit human cloning a secret. Released on November 17, 2000, "The 6th Day" made $96 million on a budget of $82 million, which means Sony took a big loss. That loss wouldn't have been quite so big if Schwarzenegger didn't take home a $25 million salary for starring, but that's what the man could charge at the time, even if he was coming off "End of Days."

Sadly, Schwarzenegger evidently felt that "The 6th Day" would reinvent his reputation. The then-53-year-old was well aware that his days as Hollywood's pre-eminent action hero were on the decline, and this mash-up of sci-fi action tropes was his way of trying to turn the tide. Unfortunately, not only was "The 6th Day" a commercial failure, it's derisive sci-fi stylings weren't exactly a hit with critics either.

Maybe we should be leery about the site which says Sean Connery's best ever movie is "Darby O'Gill and the Little People," but things don't look all that great for "The 6th Day" over on Rotten Tomatoes. A 40% critic score and a 5 out of 10 average rating isn't the worst thing ever doled out by the TomatoMeter, but it ain't great. In fairness, several critics thought the movie was a solid enough sci-fi outing, including Roger Ebert himself, who dubbed "The 6th Day," "Well-crafted entertainment containing enough ideas to qualify it as science fiction and not just as a futurist thriller."

But the prevailing view among critics seemed to be that Roger Spottiswoode had constructed a sort of sci-fi action pastiche. In his review for the New York Times, Elvis Mitchell wrote that "almost everything in the movie seems to be lifted from the DNA of other pictures" and warned that "you may find yourself waiting for its star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to awake and find that he's actually in 'Total Recall,' which was also about confusion." 

Indeed, there are so many moments in "The 6th Day" that recall more impressive Schwarzenegger outings. Even the trailer scans like a compendium of the Austrian Oak's finest on-screen moments. A fight aboard an aircraft over a downtown cityscape recalls the final moments of "True Lies," while the entire premise revolving around a regular dude caught up in the machinations of some dystopian future tech company really does feel like a "Total Recall" rip. Even the "6th Day" font looks a bit "Terminator"-esque.

Oddly enough, the hairless human bodies suspended in sacks with wires connected to their spines are also strikingly reminiscent of a non-Arnie sci-fi movie that debuted the year prior. That movie was "The Matrix," with its fetus fields packed with human growth pods. There's no way Spottiswoode saw the Wachowskis' film and had time to lift this idea. If anything, it speaks to the fears around technology that existed at the turn of the century. But it is another example of something another film did better. Frankly, if you're putting out a sci-fi actioner the year after "The Matrix" debuted, you'd better be sure it's one hell of a movie — which "The 6th Day" was, lamentably, not.