In 1996, The Eraser, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, opened just a month after Mission: Impossible. That close timing sparked a cascade of complications.
In the 1980s and 1990s, two action giants were dueling for the box office crown: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. They kept getting bigger, squaring off in ever more monumental and spectacular movies, and Hollywood fully embraced their rivalry. So much so that it wasn’t until 2010, with Stallone directing The Expendables, that the two stars finally shared the screen in the same film.
Nevertheless, a new generation of actors stepped onto the scene in the 1990s, determined to leave their own mark on action cinema. Among them, Tom Cruise. He may have looked less imposing next to the Austrian powerhouse, but in 1996 he nonetheless gave The Eraser’s production a significant run for its money, with Schwarzenegger headlining. The film’s director, Chuck Russell, recalls the tension firsthand.
I’LL BE BACK… BUT DIFFERENT
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Eraser, Chuck Russell explained how the near-simultaneous releases of his film and the first Mission: Impossible created a real headache. De Palma’s Mission: Impossible had been shot and released just before The Eraser. And both screenplays contained surprisingly similar elements, as Russell recounts:
“Mission: Impossible had shot right before ours, and we learned that a sequence of action was nearly identical to one in ours. In the CIA heist where Tom Cruise is tied to cables, I’d had Arnold almost replicate the same move to grab a disk from the CIA, and we had to rewrite so that Arnold could infiltrate the rival company Cyrez by a different route. At least I could tweak that. I didn’t want an identical scene.”
This kind of situation is pretty rare. It’s probably a coincidence, but when it happens you have to react on the fly. And honestly, it gives me an adrenaline rush. We were like, ‘Okay, we’ll craft an even better scene, but we’ve got to write it tonight.’ It can inject a shot of energy into a film. No one wants this kind of hiccup, but it didn’t sink us either.’
As the interviewer notes, the shift felt even more urgent because both movies hinge heavily on a floppy disk, including another scene where actress Vanessa Williams clandestinely downloads sensitive information. Russell points out the similarity as well, though he doesn’t see it as a catastrophe:
“It was the Arnold sequence that echoed the other one too closely, so we rewrote it. The Vanessa Williams scene doesn’t bother me much, because our film had its own tone and everything else. But I’m a Tom Cruise fan. I adore him. I’ve worked with him. I even served as an executive producer on Collateral. So there’s plenty of room for both films.”
No hard feelings, then, even though the Tom Cruise-installed film is remembered in part for that CIA moment, while The Eraser sits at a more modest cult status. Schwarzenegger fans can catch him in The Man with the Bag, arriving December 2, 2026 on Prime Video. And Tom Cruise fans are eagerly awaiting Digger, due in theaters September 30, 2026.
