10 Awesome Movies Audiences Weren't Ready For

7. Last Action Hero

Last Action Hero is perhaps the ultimate satire of overblown Hollywood action flicks, an outrageously funny action-comedy with an extremely game Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a stereotypically badass action protagonist who ends up interacting with our real world.

Released in the summer of 1993, Last Action Hero was misguidedly marketed as another straight-faced Arnie actioner, coming hot off the heels of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, even though the tone was actually aggressively tongue-in-cheek throughout.

It certainly didn't help that Columbia released it mere days after Jurassic Park, which combined with an utterly flummoxed response from critics and audiences caused Last Action Hero to bomb catastrophically at the box office.

But in the years that followed, Wes Craven proved the audience's appetite for satirical takes on genre films with both New Nightmare and the Scream sequels, and by the time we entered the 2000s, the Age of Irony was well and truly alive.

Considering how popular the self-aware likes of the Jump Street and Deadpool movies have been in recent years, it's tough not to feel like Last Action Hero was a movie made before audiences were enlightened enough to appreciate it.

It endures as a cult gem, of course, but had the masses been willing to accept Arnie poking fun at himself and the 'biz quite this blatantly, Last Action Hero could've been a stonking hit.