Why did Clint Eastwood replace Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Western Cry Macho?

Clint Eastwood owes his career to the West. He became a familiar face to American television viewers between 1959 and 1965 as the brash Rudy Yates. In the popular CBS series “Rawhide” Before traveling to Spain, where he and Italian director Sergio Leone helped revolutionize the genre with the spaghetti Western trilogy A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad. And the Ugly.” From that point on, Eastwood in any kind of Western was a big deal at the box office, which was especially impressive considering that Oatmeal’s popularity was declining throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s.

Ultimately, even Eastwood couldn’t sustain the genre. After an impressive career that included “Hang ‘Em High,” “Two Mules for Sister Sara,” “High Plains Drifter,” and “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” the star only made one Western in the 1980s (“Pale Rider”). He did not return to this genre until 1992 in the film “Unforgiven”. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Eastwood had at least one other Western in mind during the 1980s, and it might have worked had he not felt he was too young for the role. Eastwood told Parade that he thought the character needed “more mileage” than he had in person up to that point in his career. So he turned it down and almost watched Arnold Schwarzenegger take on the role 30 years later.

In a 2011 interview with Entertainment WeeklySchwarzenegger revealed his desire to participate in a film adapted from the novel by N. Richard Nash’s new Western “Cry Macho”. As he told the magazine: “A little film caught my attention because it’s so different from what you’d expect someone like me to do.” The tale of a former rodeo star sent to Mexico to retrieve a horse owner’s troubled son was a far cry from the action hero character played by Schwarzenegger, who dared to go astray at the time in a non-comedic film, but his return to acting later faced his work as Governor California had a couple of tough periods when films like “The Last Stand” and “Escape Plan” didn’t meet Austrian box office standards.

So Schwarzenegger, who had been attached to the “Cry Macho” movie since the early 2000s, abandoned the project, at which point The immature Eastwood stepped up and will be released before cameras in 2021. The film was released on HBO Max in September of that year as part of Warner Bros.’s pandemic release strategy, and thus, it did not receive the commercial boost one would expect from an Eastwood film. But this was better than the disgraceful treatment Eastwood’s “Juror No. 2” received in the courtroom this year. After being disrespected by the studio that called him home since the 1970s, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever get another period Western or another Eastwood film again — and that’s a big problem.