In the mid–1980s, a hot toy property did not automatically mean an easy sell for Hollywood producers. Properties based on action figures had just barely been allowed onto television by that point. And although there were no FCC regulations keeping them off of the big screen, there was still a stigma about things. Who knew if a toy-inspired movie would bring out the audiences who saw the cartoon at home, for free? Would adult audiences come to the theaters, as well? And who could say if such a movie would be any good in the first place?
Mattel would not be deterred. The company sided with producer Ed Pressman who, strangely enough, had just produced the live-action Conan the Barbarian film in 1982. As they’d done with Filmation, they would be putting up half of the expense for the film, and letting the film studio invest the rest. Pressman commissioned a script from David Odell, whose genre credits included Jim Henson’s cult classic The Dark Crystal and 1984’s adaptation of DC Comics’ Supergirl. Mattel’s executives had faith in the project, but were aware of how expensive a film could be when it was set on a planet as outlandish as Eternia. Odell was told to write with a smaller budget in mind, and Pressman began shopping the property around.
The company was interested in a finished film that grew their brand and stayed true to the characters. They would have an important veto power over the script and certain elements of design. Perhaps due to their highly successful partnership with Filmation over the cartoon series, executives were open to fresh takes and willing to hand over a great deal of creative control. They did, however, retain two pivotal rights: Mattel would choose the film’s director, and they would choose who would become the human face of He-Man.
The man who would be He-Man was born Hans Dolph Lundgren in Stockholm, Sweden, 1957. A thin and sickly child, he was called “Little Hans,” and suffered from severe allergies and asthma. At a young age, he came down with a viral respiratory tract disease that would restrict his breath until his face turned blue.
“One of my earliest blurry childhood memories is from a hospital in Stockholm,” Lundgren recalled. “I remember the dim lights and the smells. Ether vapors, disinfectants, or whatever it may have been. I lay alone in my hospital room staring up at the ceiling.”1 He was four at the time, and it would be a long while until he was healthier. Growing up as the weakest boy in school was a surefire way to attract bullies.
His home life wasn’t much better. Lundgren’s father was a large, manic depressive man, prone to sudden bursts of anger and violence. The young Hans, like his mother, bore the brunt of his father’s cruelty. Looking back on that difficult time, Lundgren said, “It may sound strange, but you can get used to physical abuse. You find strategies to survive and even retaliate. I fought back by trying not to scream, cry, or show any pain when he hit me. I wasn’t always successful.”2
Haunted by his upbringing, he grew up desperate to prove himself and driven to not be bullied again. By the age of seven, he’d begun studying judo and other martial arts.
This is not to say he neglected his schoolwork. After graduating high school with top marks, he studied abroad in the United States under scholarships, attending Washington State University and Clemson University in South Carolina. He completed his degree in chemical engineering back at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, and then got his Masters from Australia’s University of Sydney. Even in the tough field of chemical engineering, Lundgren graduated at the top of his class.
He had grown tall over the years, and gained muscle mass from his training in the martial arts. Lundgren focused on a full-contact karate called Kyokushin, a style made famous by Japanese masters like Sonny Chiba. By 1979, he had earned a black belt and was the captain of the Swedish Kyokushin team for the Kyokushin Karate Organization’s World Open Tournament. Still practicing into the early 1980s, he won two European Karate championships, and another in Australia.
While finishing his master’s degree in Sydney, Lundgren utilized his intimidating stature as a club bouncer. That’s where he met the statuesque singer and model, Grace Jones. Initially hiring on the imposing young chemical engineer as a bodyguard, the two quickly began dating.
Graduating at the top of his class earned Lundgren the incredibly prestigious Fullbright Scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All packed to move to Boston, he changed his plans when he and Jones became an item. Instead, he decided to move to New York with her.
Lundgren returned to bouncing, now at Manhattan’s Limelight club, and spent his free time with the likes of Andy Warhol and others in the New York art scene. He tried his hand at modeling, but found himself too tall and muscular for many. Jones had turned to acting by this point, finding her breakthrough role in 1984’s Schwarzenegger sequel, Conan the Destroyer. She became a Bond girl the next year in Roger Moore’s A View to a Kill. As Lundgren had been taking some acting classes since they’d relocated, Jones arranged a small role for her boyfriend. He can be seen briefly in the film as an evil henchman. Still, it was a big budget film, and his character was credited with a name instead of simply “KGB Agent #2”; it was an impressive role for someone with no formal training.
He found himself bitten by the acting bug, and it didn’t take him long to find his next gig. The film with his career-defining role was released just a few months later, at the tail end of 1985: Rocky IV. To an entire generation of filmgoers, he would always be known as Ivan Drago, the seemingly indestructible Russian boxer.
The character of Drago required minimal acting from Lundgren. He was not a brash or boastful opponent for Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa, the way Carl Weathers’ character Apollo Creed had been. In fact, the majority of speaking was done for him by various Soviet trainers or his wife, played by Brigitte Nielson. What the role did call for was an imposing physicality, something Lundgren brought in spades.
As for the character’s fighting skills and strength, called “freakish” by a reporter in the film, Lundgren’s casting may have been a little too perfect. In an incident that was reported during filming a boxing scene, Lundgren picked up Carl Weathers and threw him some three feet into the ring’s corner. Weathers climbed out of the ring and threatened to quit.3
While filming another of the film’s matches between Rocky and Drago, Stallone, who was also directing, suggested he and Lundgren should actually hit each other, instead of pulling punches for the camera, in order to get into the minds of their characters. “After the third take of taking body blows, I felt a burning in my chest, but ignored it,” Stallone later recalled. Later that night, he was struggling to breathe and needed to be rushed to the emergency room. He stayed in intensive care for eight days. Stallone explained: “What had happened is he struck me so hard in the chest that my heart slammed against my breastbone and began to swell, so the beating became labored, and without medical attention the heart would’ve continued to swell until it stopped. Many people that have car accidents die like this when the steering wheel slams into their chest.”4 The car that caused this accident, however, was Dolph Lundgren’s fist.
Rocky IV was patently ridiculous, with a story that introduced a robot sidekick and a script full of patriotic platitudes, including a speech from Rocky at the conclusion which is implied to have settled the Cold War. Still, the film was a runaway success. It was the most successful sports film for the next two decades, spawning more sequels for Stallone and making Dolph Lundgren a star.
And he was exactly what Mattel was looking for. Lundgren was a name-brand action hero who was new enough in the business to not scoff at playing an action figure. He was tall and blond and possessed the kind of musculature of their toys brought to life. As far as the toy company was concerned, they’d found their He-Man.
For their director, Mattel put their trust in Ed Pressman. The producer’s brother ran Pressman Toys, a gaming company, who had once employed a young man named Gary Goddard.
Goddard was a California boy who found a calling in entertainment. This started early, as he was a musician in high school. He worked in the gaming industry, helping to design the board game Candy Land and even serving as the visual basis for King Kandy. Then, after a stint as an Imagineer for Disney, he formed Gary Goddard Productions in 1980. The company specialized in attractions for high-end hotels and theme parks. It would become Landmark Entertainment a few years later. The company led to work across various fields of entertainment, many of which were based on or tied into popular films or licensed characters. One of these jobs was creating a live show called “Conan: A Sword and Sorcery Spectacular” for Universal Studios.
The Conan show allowed Goddard to experiment more with directing, something he’d always been interested in. The show was considered groundbreaking, full of dramatic lighting and practical effects, and it turned a lot of heads.
He said, “I knew that Ed Pressman was looking for a director so I called him up and told him that I’d directed the Conan show.”5 Pressman and David Odell, who had finished his script, went to see a performance. Immediately thereafter, they called Goddard back and arranged a meeting.
This was not his first brush with Hollywood. Goddard had previously been commissioned to write a screenplay treatment based on the Marvel Comics heroine Dazzler, whom producers expected to be played by Bo Derek of 10 fame. While his treatment was well-received, the film went nowhere. Producers kept Goddard on hand to co-write the project Derek did do: another Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation called Tarzan, the Ape Man. The 1981 film, retelling the familiar Tarzan story from the perspective of Jane Parker, did not go over well. Though it made a decent return at the box office, it was widely panned and nominated for six Golden Raspberry awards that year. Derek “won” for Worst Actress, but the script by Goddard and Tim Rowe fortunately went home empty-handed.
The aspiring film director was well known to Mattel by this point, as well. After Gary Goddard Productions contributed to an aborted project called “The Peanut Butter Papers” for the toy company, they were kept in contact with to act as consultants. By the time Pressman brought up Goddard’s name for a potential director, higher ups at Mattel, like Executive Vice President of Marketing Joe Morrison, recognized his name.
Ed Pressman was a supporter of first-time directors, so a lack of cinematic experience did not disqualify the young Goddard. Morrison and the other Mattel executives quickly signed off on him as well. With both a star and a director in place, not to mention their financing and a household name in He-Man, Mattel had everything they needed for a hit movie … except for a film studio to make it.
Along with Pressman, the producer, Mattel executives like Morrison and John Weems, the Senior Vice President of Entertainment, began making the rounds. “Universal Studios was interested,” Morrison said, “and then Cannon came to us and made an offer on the deal that we thought was the right thing to do at the right time.”6
Cannon Films was famous, if not infamous, by that point. The film company was on a calculated and not terribly covert mission to become a big, respected studio in Hollywood. Their main tactic was a blitzkrieg of content; with 25 releases in 1985 alone, they produced a shockingly high number of films for a non-major studio. Many, if not most, were not well received critically or commercially. Regardless of quality or overall profitability, their movies were shown and their name was everywhere.
Signing with Cannon did not guarantee a masterpiece by any means, but they were a brand name that guaranteed a film could be completed quickly and on the cheap. Any heavy lifting in terms of marketing or appeal, Mattel figured, could be left to He-Man.
As for the studio, a live-action Masters of the Universe film would stick close to their genre and exploitation film roots while utilizing a larger budget than they were accustomed. The film, with its PG rating, would likely reach out to a broader audience than their standard ninja and vigilante films could. More than anything, they saw it, along with other films like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) and their Stallone vehicle Over the Top (1987), as their way to finally break into the world of Hollywood blockbusters and gain respect in the industry. They’d been seen as the quirky underdog studio for several years at that point, and they were ready to break into the big leagues.
Cannon Films was founded in 1967 by Dennis Friedland and Christopher C. Dewey, two film buffs in their 20s who kept the company afloat by releasing English-dubbed softcore pornographic films from Sweden. Scrappy and ambitious, the company turned their attention to exploitation films of other sorts. They released Fando and Lis in 1970, a cinematic footnote for being the first full-length film by eccentric auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky. It had to be extensively censored before release in the United States, and it was not greeted favorably.
The young studio’s first, and possibly greatest, success came later that year in the form of Joe. The gritty and hyper-violent revenge drama starred Peter Boyle and captured the spirit of a troubled moment in American culture. Showcasing the frustrated divide between generations in the midst of the Vietnam War, the film pitted the titular blue collar conservative everyman against the perceived draft-dodging, drug-addled youth. It seemed to express the frustrations of much of the country, and gave enough violent wish fulfillment to make conservative filmgoers reportedly stand up and cheer in the theaters.
Cannon’s film excelled at the box office. Off of its budget of just over $100,000, it took in nearly $20 million, making it one of the highest grossing movies of the year. It was received just as warmly by critics. Time magazine declared it “a film of Freudian anguish, biblical savagery and immense social and cinematic importance.”7 It even received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
Cannon was, unfortunately, unable to capitalize on such a shocking success. Joe was the company’s first film which could not objectively be described at pornographic, and everything else they had in the works was not exactly in the mainstream’s sensibilities. As the ’70s wore on, Friedland and Dewey churned out domestic releases of risqué or exploitative foreign films, and the occasional softcore of their own design, such as The Happy Hooker (1975) and its sequel, The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington (1977). Business was not going well.
Their dealings with foreign filmmakers had brought them in contact with Israeli director Menahem Golan and his cousin/producing partner, Yoram Globus, on more than one occasion. The two had been making movies together since the mid–’60s, reaching the peak of Israel’s film industry. Branching out to get their films distributed outside of their home country introduced them to Friedland and Dewey, who released their film Lupo! in the States in 1971.
Their second collaboration came in 1978 with the release of Operation Thunderbolt, based on the Israeli Defense Forces’ real-life hostage rescue at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport two years earlier. Golan directed, shooting an alternate version of every scene in English only for an American release through Cannon. This proved to be a wise decision. The film was a hit in their home country, and it also nabbed a nomination for the Academy Award’s Best Foreign Language Film.
Shortly thereafter, Golan and Globus moved to the states and made an offer. At $.20 per share, the two would need to raise $500,000 to buy the company. That was $500,00 they didn’t have. What they did have was the international contacts to sell films around the world. Author Andrew Yule chronicled this one-of-a-kind offer in his scathing exposé, Hollywood a Go-Go: “The cousins were convinced that the films in Cannon’s vaults had been undersold in the international market, so they went to Friedland and Dewey with a typically outrageous proposal. Cannon should give them the rights to their catalogue in the foreign and ancillary markets for a 25% commission, this to cover the cost of buying Cannon.”8
And so, through some curious accounting, Cannon Films was reborn.
Under new management, the company continued releasing exploitation titles. In 1980, Golan and Globus oversaw a larger production slate. There was a third Happy Hooker installment, the slasher films called Schizoid and New Years Evil, and other largely forgettable cash-in flicks. The expanded audience and resources allowed Golan and Globus to indulge in some dream projects. The first of such films was 1980’s The Apple. Directed by Golan, it was low in budget yet epic in scope, a sci-fi disco opera full of biblical allegory and music industry satire, with not a hint of subtlety visible to audiences. While it was released to capitalize on musicals like Grease (1978) and Xanadu (1980), it was also fulfilling the filmmaker’s dream to make a creation myth story. However, The Apple was laughed out of theaters. Famously, the studio handed out copies of the soundtrack at the film’s premiere, most of which were thrown at the screen.9
The year 1981, however, saw the release of Enter the Ninja, starring a severely miscast Franco Nero as a heroic martial artist. A reasonably successful film, Enter the Ninja is better known for its impact on the cinematic culture of the early ’80s: it introduced America to the ninja. It was followed by dozens of riffs, knockoffs, and official Cannon Films sequels.
By this point, Golan and Globus were gaining a reputation not only as scrappy B-movie underdogs, but also as hyperbolizing self-promoters. The two were so often so eager to prove themselves as serious American filmmakers, they would advertise for movies that did not, and never would, exist. This method led to an extra dose of advertisement: by announcing a film set to star both Sean Connery and Roger Moore, for example, the company would get more press when the stars and their agents has to say there would be no movie teaming up the two James Bond actors. Cannon Films still ended up in the papers.
In late 1980, the company took out massive advertising space to promote their upcoming films. One title listed was Death Wish II, a sequel to the popular Charles Bronson revenge drama from the mid–’70s. There was no script for such a film. In fact, Cannon did not own the rights. When Dino De Laurentiis, the Italian producer who did own the rights to Death Wish, learned of this, he made a call to the Israeli upstarts.
As explained by Brian Garfield, author of the novel Death Wish was based on, “His lawyers explained to the people at Cannon that they could face a serious lawsuit for fraud (because they did not own any rights to Death Wish) or they could buy the rights from De Laurentiis, Landers-Roberts and me, for a price to be determined by us. Cannon, against the wall, gave in. Dino forced them to make the movie.”10
The price tags for the film rights and the star, Charles Bronson, were less expensive than a lawsuit, but it made Death Wish II (1982) the most expensive Cannon film yet. When it turned a modest profit and put the company on Hollywood’s radar, however, Golan and Globus discovered their unique business strategy: pre-sales and loads of hype.
Cannon Films were run by salesmen, and aggressive ones at that. Golan would sell a movie’s rights to theater chains and video distributors around the world before that film was finished. Sometimes, before it was even started. By guaranteeing a certain amount of income up front, the company would attempt to off-set the costs of productions, marketing, and distribution. As the company amassed their stable of regular actors, such as Charles Bronson, and regular directors, such as Golan himself, they could put together a prospective poster full to sell foreign markets. Sometimes promising a bankable name would allow the company to sell a region. In other instances where the language barrier was too wide, Golan was able to sell a market based on the poster image alone.
This led to situations like 1983’s 10 to Midnight. On one visit to the Cannes Film Festival to woo foreign distributors, a Cannon producer pitched an interesting sounding title to Golan: “10 to Midnight.” With no film in production, or even preproduction, under such a title, the chairman still told everyone about the movie. Describing it as full of “great action and great danger and great revenge,”11 he managed to pre-sell some international markets for the non-existent film. Then, Cannon simply had to acquire a script, in this case a cop-versus-serial-killer thriller titled “Bloody Sunday,” and change the name. In other similar situations, the company would commission writers to fashion a full script based off a title, and maybe one actor, alone. In most cases, that would be enough.
Along with the foreign territories, Golan and Globus also targeted the burgeoning VHS market and new pay movie channels like HBO. In interviews, the moguls bragged about their no-frills approach to business; they did not spend money on expensive lunches or vacations, they claimed; they just worked. They also indulged in other cost-saving tricks that bordered on unethical and verged on illegal. For example, the longer they held onto their funds, even after it’d been spent, the more interest it could accrue. Most payments were made as late as possible. This led to a bad reputation in Hollywood among actors, writers, and crew members. Unions had to be called to threaten lawsuits on their behalves on more than one occasion.
As for the money these employees were meant to be paid, that was another story altogether. The cousins were dogged by rumors of mafia connections for years. There was seemingly no other way they could continue to produce so many films when few, if any, made a profit.
Their actual finances were less of a money laundering operation and more of a one-level pyramid scheme. Cannon’s bookkeepers would claim over exaggerated expected profits for the first two years after any film’s release. They would not need to claim any expenses for films in production, so they produced more and more to hide the failures when the real box office takes were announced. As long as they continued to produce more and more films, their very real losses were off-set by the hypothetical wins on paper. Any profits were quickly sent to accounts in tax haven countries to save every penny they could.12
The company’s strategy was built around the hope of one Star Wars-level hit blockbuster. If something they made was successful enough, it could pay off all the building debt and hidden losses. And the more movies they made, the better their chances of making that one-of-a-kind hit. With each consecutive loss, they could do nothing else but make more movies.
After the modest and impactful hit of Enter the Ninja, Golan and Globus were able to influence culture again on more than one occasion. The next came in 1984 with the dance film Breakin’.
Inspired by a German documentary about the urban fad of breakdancing, Breakin’ struck a chord with young audiences. Its portrayal of rapping and the burgeoning hip hop culture was novel enough to garner attention, not to mention the astounding dance moves by real-life breakdancers/first-time actors Adolfo “Shabba Do” Quiñones and Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers. The film debuted the same weekend as Sixteen Candles, and it managed to beat John Hughes’ modern classic to the number one spot. Off of the Cannon-standard budget of barely over $1 million, its total box office gross was more than $38 million.
Thanks to the success of Breakin,’ more Americans was exposed to rap music and hip hop dancing. Scant months later, Cannon cashed in with Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. It was not as successful as its predecessor, but its title has gone down in pop culture history.
Around this time, the company began working with action star Chuck Norris. Norris had already starred in several action movies, like A Force of One and Lone Wolf McQuade, before teaming with Golan and Globus. With very few exceptions, he would only work with Cannon Films for the next decade.
Norris’s first Cannon film was 1984’s Missing in Action, a military fantasy piece about a former POW returning to Vietnam ten years after the war to free the prisoners who remained. It is notable for cashing in on the success of Rambo: First Blood Part II before that film even came out. While Rambo was still filming, Cannon was able to read its original treatment written by James Cameron. Thus “inspired,” the filmmakers cranked theirs out fast enough to beat the Stallone film.13 Widely panned by critics, Missing in Action still made great money at the box office. It was deemed successful enough to release its already-filmed prequel the next year, and shoot a third installment in 1988.
Of the nine Cannon films Norris made between 1984 and 1994, perhaps the most noteworthy would be 1986’s The Delta Force. It was another from the “prisoner rescue military fantasy” genre made famous by Rambo: First Blood Part II and Missing in Action, not to mention others like Uncommon Valor, but this one did not revolve around a decade-old war.
The Delta Force was based on the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which had occurred just months prior. However, instead of the two weeks of tense negotiations and complex international diplomacy, the Golan-directed film spun the real-world events into an over-the-top action spectacle. On the big screen, Chuck Norris’s team of commandos eschewed reality to save the day with motorcycles capable of firing missiles. With every terrorist’s death came a pithy one-liner. This was a different kind of exploitation film, and audiences ate it up.
With a substantially larger budget than previous Cannon fare, The Delta Force managed to turn a small profit for the studio. It did not, however, receive many positive reviews. Though Roger Ebert said it “tantalizes us with its parallels to real life,”14 others found capitalizing on a very real, very recent tragedy tasteless. This was not a retelling of factual events, like Operation Thunderbolt had been. It was pure Hollywood revisionism. Variety’s review called the film out for “rewriting” fresh history, “thereby turning itself into an exercise in wish fulfillment for those who favor force instead of diplomacy.”15
But it wasn’t all crowd-pleasers and cheap, trashy exploitation films. Golan and Globus were also looking for the respect and acceptance of the larger studios, and this led them to produce a surprising number of “art house” films as the 1980s progressed. The cousins worked with respected filmmakers like John Cassavetes in 1984 for the critically acclaimed Love Streams, and Norman Mailer for the much less loved Tough Guys Don’t Dance. The company’s release of Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear, the contract for which was a napkin the infamous director signed, similarly flopped. On the other hand, Cannon’s production of the opera Otello won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. They also produced two films for the Russian-American director Andrei Konchalovsky, including the multiple Oscar nominee Runaway Train and one of the hits of the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, Shy People.
Cannes became an obsession of Golan and Globus. The two producers were regulars at the festival, always showing up to hyperbolize their upcoming projects and debut the classier of their films. Still, the producers were never able to win the festival’s coveted Palme d’Or award. The industry respect and mainstream credibility Cannon wanted were also not materializing. Try as they might, they were still being viewed as a B-movie studio.
In the interest of diversifying the company, along with ensuring their films were always shown, Golan and Globus began buying up theater chains. They began with foreign chains like Italy’s Cannon Cinema Italia and Cannon Tuschinski Theatres, the biggest theater chain in the Netherlands. Next came Screen Entertainment of Britain, making Cannon “the largest motion picture exhibitor in the United Kingdom with 485 screens.”16 Along with the smaller theater chains they’d bought before, they controlled about 39 percent of the UK film market.
In the United States, the cousins bought Commonwealth Theatres, the sixth-largest chain of cinemas in the country. Whatever films their studio made, they were able to make sure they would not be kept off of the big screen all around the globe. This helped to add to the illusion of their success, and also to fulfill contracts which guaranteed a theatrical release for their stars.
Even as their budgets began creeping higher and they courted respected directors, they had not managed a big summer blockbuster. Their surprise hits like Breakin’ were more due to economics of scale: if they had been more expensive to produce, such a return at the box office would not have been so impressive. And even the grosses from films like Breakin’ were not enough to compete with the major studios. There was also the matter of consistency: for every successful movie, there were several that failed to launch. It was enough to make the financial experts of Hollywood begin to ask questions about their bookkeeping methods.
Still, the cousins worked to be taken seriously by the traditional movie studios they were trying to compete with. Those studios would release some lower budget fare and distribute for independently produced films, like Cannon did, but they would also fill their coffers with the revenue from a big-budget “tentpole” picture or two. If Golan and Globus wanted to make the profits of a big studio, and to be viewed as one themselves, they’d need to invest a staggering amount of money into their products.
While the occasional film budget stretched to $8 or $15 million toward the middle of the decade, Cannon Film’s first attempt at a big-budget was 1985’s Lifeforce. The sci-fi spectacle piece, directed by Tobe Hooper, cost a reported $25 million.
The film itself, based on a pulpy ’70s novel called The Space Vampires, concerned an alien race of vampires brought back to Earth by astronauts. The story slowly evolves from sci-fi to horror to a full-blown global disaster crisis, with occasional dashes of outright comedy, over the course of its two-hour running time. The strange roller coaster path of its tone, along with some impressive special effects, were enough to win over some critics. Unfortunately, the R-rated film opened against Ron Howard’s feel-good Cocoon in an already dismal year for ticket sales. Lifeforce flopped hard.
With $25 million budgets, successes needed to be bigger and failures cut deeper; Cannon would be suffering from Lifeforce for years to come.
Taking another shot at their career-making blockbuster, Golan and Globus turned to Sylvester Stallone. Though the star was apparently uninterested in working with the studio, he came around when the producers offered to pay him a record-setting $12 million for his involvement. Their desperation showing, Cannon Films was now paying one actor more than the entire budgets had been for most of their best-grossing films.
Golan directed the resulting film, 1987’s Over the Top. The melodramatic sports picture starred Stallone as a truck driver trying to gain custody of his alienated son while also winning the World Armwrestling Championship. Despite a soundtrack full of popular rock bands and a script co-written by Stallone and Academy Award winner Stirling Silliphant, it wasn’t a hit inspirational sports movie like Rocky had been. It barely made back more than half of its budget.
By this point, newspapers had begun running stories about the company’s disappointments and cash flow problems. With every Cannon Films disappointment came another round of speculation about just how long the company could stay solvent while trying to compete with the major studios.
How Cannon funded its pictures, most of which did not perform well, had become the subject of much discussion in Hollywood circles. Many experts in the industry began accusing Golan and Globus of being too optimistic in their reporting of revenue. Gordon Crawford, senior vice present of Capital Guardian Research, went on record saying, “They keep reporting higher earnings on pictures that nobody goes to see.”17
Mid–1986, Cannon Films disclosed that the Securities and Exchange Commission were beginning an informal inquiry into their accounting and business practices.
“Bankruptcy” was the word being whispered about the company even as they signed their deal with Mattel to make Masters of the Universe. Golan and Globus had other big projects in the works at the time, including their deal with DC Comics and Warner Brothers to produce the fourth installment in the Christopher Reeve Superman franchise. There would be other smaller budget releases as well, more sequels for Death Wish and Missing in Action, the occasional arthouse fare like Street Smart, and a line of films based on familiar, public domain fairy tales already adapted by Disney, called Cannon Movie Tales.
A successful Masters of the Universe film would be exactly what Golan and Globus needed to keep their company moving forward. Between name brand recognition, content that skewed toward children, and a story that incorporated time-tested elements of the Monomyth, the film would have everything required to be a big, hit, franchise movie. All they needed to do was get it finished before their company collapsed.