Universal Soldier ($95,000,000), and Nowhere to Run ($52,189,039) proved that Van Damme was no one-hit wonder. Like many martial artists looking to make the jump to silver screen heroics, the actor made his name in the B-movie realms of cult production company The Cannon Group, 1988‘s Bloodsport and 1989‘s Kickboxer each making $50,000,000 internationally from budgets in the region of $2,000,000, and it would only get better for the Belgian-born star as we moved into the 90s. In fact, Van Damme’s stock had been quietly growing under the noses of the industry’s action super heavyweights during the late-1980s, at least on non-American shores, the success of his highest-grossing movies largely attributed to his popularity in Europe. He wasn’t Schwarzenegger or Stallone, but he was as close as he’d ever get, and he was a million miles away from the bargain-basement days of No Retreat No Surrender and Cyborg. Arnie and Sly were on an entirely different planet to everyone else commercially, but there were plenty of stars who would guarantee butts in seats, and in 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme was near the top of that list.Īt that point in his career, and with John Woo’s hyper-stylish Hard Target already under his belt, Van Damme was hot shit in Hollywood. Schwarzenegger’s biggest commercial rival, Sylvester Stallone, gave us Demolition Man, which in many ways felt like a direct response to Arnie’s landscape-shifting commercial juggernaut, sci-fi helping the Austrian-born star to finally usurp his American counterpart at the box office.
Dick adaptation Total Recall got the decade off to a bang with its mesmerising brand of high-concept dystopia and in-your-face violence, but it was James Cameron’s monumental Terminator 2: Judgement Day, then the most expensive film ever produced, that led to something of a sub-genre boom, one that stretched from blockbuster spectaculars to the B-movie doldrums. Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-violent Phillip K. To be a truly global action star, you needed one under your belt.
Action sci-fi movies were all the rage back in the early 90s.
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