Before carolco went under, which didn't take very long.
Ah, so you know all about it. I was a big fan, when that Carolco logo would start in an action movie, I knew I was in for a treat or when I saw "Mario Kassar Presents." Some time ago, I wondered whatever happened to him and Vajna ? I found this article and I gotta say, it's a helluva interesting story, the rise and fall of Carolco... I'd highly recommend reading all of it, it's quite a story!! It's 9 pages, but it's very worth the time to read if you remember this company and appreciated it.
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,628785,00.html - "The Boys Who Burned a Billion Dollars"
Back in the day, Kassar and Vajna ran a company called Carolco, and produced just about every big, dumb, loud, profitable action movie in town. They were the money, if not the minds, behind Terminator and Rambo, Basic Instinct and Total Recall. They spent wildly on unworkable projects and unmentionable extravagances. They jacked up star salaries in a way that still causes studio executives to curse bitterly. And their company imploded in a debacle of petty jealousy and bitter competition, not to mention federal investigations and bankruptcy proceedings. One lost everything, and the other waltzed off a rich man.
Some interesting tidbits:
"On one floor you had Roland Emmerich, Renny Harlin, Oliver Stone, James Cameron, Adrian Lyne, Paul Verhoeven, all sharing offices. It was incredible!" says Dean Devlin, who cowrote Universal Soldier and Stargate for Carolco. "And you got paid much more than you got paid anywhere else."
The 1995 Chapter 11 proceedings generated 360,000 pages in court filings. Vajna watched regretfully from afar, fretting about his former friend and furious that it had all gone wrong. ''Carolco should today be much bigger than New Line,'' insists Vajna. ''Look at the assets: Spider-Man, X-Men, Terminator, Total Recall, Rambo, and Stargate. You name it.'' Says Devlin: ''Think about it. Had they been able to keep Carolco going a little bit longer, the next two movies would have been Independence Day and Titanic. [Nearly] 3 billion dollars in worldwide box office.'
ID and Titanic were just around the corner from their directors, but it all went elsewhere after the bankruptcy cause of a few disasters before like Show Girls and the pirate movie. The IRS helped destroy them too actually...
With the bankruptcy, you had an auction of all the assets, one of which was of course the Terminator franchise. Here's how that went:
Finally, in 1997, one of the last remaining Carolco assets came up for auction: 50 percent of Terminator 3. Everyone considered Fox the favorite -- the company had a relationship with James Cameron, and he was talking about writing and directing the sequel. But two surprise bidders derailed them with a bid of $8 million: Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna.
...
A few months later, Kassar moved into Vajna's Cinergi offices and C2 Pictures was born. They called the old gang to let them know they were back and pulled together money for their Terminator bid. (The lion's share came from Vajna, but Kassar kicked in what he could by mortgaging a piece of beach property.) Then they made their move -- and those jaws in Hollywood dropped.
As it turned out, they hadn't changed a bit. After blindsiding Fox and their old friend Cameron -- and nearly destroying their relationship with him in the process -- they bought the second half of the rights. Then they found a new director in Jonathan Mostow. Cast Arnold. Blew a lot of stuff up. And made $150 million domestically.
Sucks, you could've had another Terminator with James Cameron at the director's chair... Instead, we just got a crap sequel that milked the success of the first two. But I dunno, Cameron was asked about it by a fan at some event and I do remember seeing Arnold from the T3 set calling on him to come "direct my movie" but Cameron said that he was just "done" with the 2nd movie and wanted to do other things...
Little tangent here, apologies, but I thought it might be interesting to some.
