How Arnold Schwarzenegger's ‘Eraser’ Marked the Death of 80s Action

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Eraser, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, is a classic Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick. He plays U.S. Marshal John “The Eraser” Kruger, the guy who gets called in when a federal witness simply has way too many assassins crawling around them and needs to disappear in a hurry. But there’s a mole within the Marshals service, and Kruger has to go on the run from his former mentor with an extremely high-risk witness (Vanessa Williams) so she can testify against a defense contractor selling experimental weaponry on the black market. There’s a plane crash and a shootout in the middle of a zoo, plus several scenes of high-tech gobbledygook designed to explain why Arnold is suddenly hacking into mainframes and dual-wielding laser canons. Basically, Eraser was the perfect vehicle to carry Schwarzenegger’s 80s action hero persona through a new decade and into a new millennium. The problem is, as suddenly as Arnold found himself snapping computers and hacking necks in a thriller about digital espionage, audiences just as suddenly seemed to stop caring. So, what happened? In order to answer that question, we must first travel back to the beginning.

There was a period throughout most of the 1980s and part of the 1990s when some of the biggest movies in the world were blockbuster action vehicles starring a handful of musclebound superstars. Annual “best of the box office” lists were regularly topped by the latest Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone movie, and sometimes the new Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, and very occasionally the new Steven Seagal movie. There were some Chucks Norris and some Brians Bosworth in the mix too, but for the most part, this brass ring was the exclusive domain of these dudes. If we’re being honest, it was the domain of two of these dudes: Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the godfathers of 80s action movies.

The basic formula to most of these films is simple – an impossible metahuman beefcake with a fanciful name (like Commando’s John Matrix or Cobra’s Marion Cobretti) is tasked with becoming a one-man army to mow down a legion of adversaries. Because this was the 80s and 90s, the adversaries were usually vaguely defined extremists, like drug-dealing revolutionaries, or drug-dealing Satanists. Also, the beefcake frequently tasks himself with this mission.

Escapism of the time was partially a reaction to fearmongering reports of rampant crime waves spreading throughout the country, so watching an everyman like Charles Bronson pick up a gun in a spiraling and improbable number of Death Wish sequels to dispense some street justice was a popular fantasy. Granted, Schwarzenegger and Stallone don’t come anywhere close to meeting a conventional definition of the word “everyman,” but that’s where the street justice fantasy bled over into our abiding fascination with superheroes, which you may have noticed has continued to this day albeit in a slightly different iteration. The bottom line is audiences enjoyed paying money to watch yoked avatars of vengeance lay absolute waste to scores of loosely defined bad guys using an arsenal of military grade weaponry and entirely too many explosions. (Paradoxically, there has never been an agreed-upon metric to grade the number of explosions in a given film; the industry rule of thumb has long been a blanket assumption that your movie needs more booms regardless of any genre or budgetary concerns.)

There’s no denying Stallone had the market pretty well cornered at the beginning of the 80s. With not one but two bonafide action franchises to his name between Rocky and Rambo, Stallone was free to crank out truly unhinged gems like Over the Top, Cobra, and Tango & Cash to fuel his fascinating ego. Schwarzenegger was mostly churning away in the background, gradually building his resume with films like The Terminator, Commando, Predator, and The Running Man, before finally obliterating all the strong dude competition forevermore with Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991.

The “beefcake action picture” continued to evolve during the first half of the 1990s, with Stallone and Schwarzenegger each enjoying substantial hits in addition to Terminator 2 such as Cliffhanger, The Specialist, and True Lies. Van Damme hung in there as well with career-high successes like Timecop and Universal Soldier. Even Seagal had something to add with Under Siege, both his biggest financial success and the only good film he has ever made. But the status of the one-man army action movie as a reliable hit began to wane right around the midpoint of the decade. It’s as if 80s action heroes had a firm expiration date in 1995/1996 that was clearly visible to everyone but the action heroes themselves.