Clint Eastwood Replaced Arnold Schwarzenegger In A Western That Was Decades In The Making

Warner Bros

Clint Eastwood owes his career to Westerns. He became a familiar face to American television viewers between 1959 and 1965 as the ramrod Rowdy Yates in the popular CBS series "Rawhide" before venturing off to Spain, where, with Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, he helped turn the genre on its ear with the Spaghetti Western trilogy of "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More," and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." From that point forward, Eastwood in any kind of Western was a big deal at the box office, which was especially impressive considering that oaters were declining in popularity throughout the 1960s and into the '70s.

Ultimately, even Eastwood couldn't keep the genre afloat. After an impressive run that included "Hang 'Em High," "Two Mules for Sister Sara," "High Plains Drifter," and "The Outlaw Josey Wales," the star only made one proper Western in the 1980s ("Pale Rider"), and didn't return to the genre until 1992 for "Unforgiven." But this wasn't for a lack of trying. Eastwood had at least one other Western in mind during the '80s and probably would've made it had he not felt like he was too young for the part. Eastwood told Parade he thought the character needed "more mileage" on him than he personally had up to that point of his career. So he turned it down and nearly watched Arnold Schwarzenegger take on the role 30 years later.

Lionsgate

In a 2011 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Schwarzenegger revealed that he was eager to star in an adaptation of N. Richard Nash's new-Western novel "Cry Macho." As he told the magazine, "It's a little movie that got my attention because it is so opposite of what you'd expect someone like me to do." The tale of a former rodeo star who's sent to Mexico to retrieve a horse owner's troubled son was about as far from Schwarzenegger's action-hero persona as he'd dared to stray at the time in a non-comedy, but his return to acting after serving as the Governor of California for two terms hit a rough patch when films like "The Last Stand" and "Escape Plan" didn't perform up to the Austrian's boffo box office standards.

So Schwarzenegger, who'd been attached to "Cry Macho" since the early 2000s, let the project go, at which point a nonagenarian Eastwood stepped up and brought it before cameras in 2021. The movie got dumped to HBO Max in September of that year as part of Warner Bros. pandemic release strategy, and, thus, didn't get quite the commercial push one expects from an Eastwood movie. This, however, was better than the disgraceful treatment Eastwood's fine courtroom drama, "Juror #2," received this year. After getting disrespected by the studio he's called home since the 1970s, it seems unlikely that we'll ever get another Western or a movie period from Eastwood again — and this is a huge bummer.