The 1980s was a tremendous decade for action movies. It seemed every time you turned around, a new hit was being made that would go on to be an endearing classic. Stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvetser Stallone dominated the box office, and now, one such action favorite critics call a “comic book movie on steroids” has returned to the streaming charts 40 years after its debut.
Hitting theaters on October 4, 1985, Schwarzenegger’s Commando was an immediate action hit that took in more than $57 million at the box office. It’s now returned in 2025 to thrill viewers on HBO Max, where it’s become a hit on the global Top 10 per Flix Patrol. The pseudo-revenge thriller features the Austrian star doing what he does best: delivering hilarious one-liners and obliterating the bad guys.
Also starring Rae Dawn Chong, Alyssa Milano, Vernon Wells, Bill Duke and Dan Hedaya, Commando is a glorious, over-the-top action favorite that hit at just the right time in history. Schwarzenegger was hot off of The Terminator a year earlier, which propelled him into the stratosphere of success. As such, people turned out in droves to see how he’d fair playing a father desperate to rescue his daughter. Commando is the original Taken, if you will, and to this day it clearly remains a preferred pick of many. Check out the synopsis below:
“Retired Special Forces soldier John Matrix (Schwarzenegger) lives with daughter Jenny (Milano) in isolation, but his privacy is disturbed by former commander Franklin Kirby (James Olson), who warns him that his fellow soldiers are getting killed one by one. After Kirby leaves, Jenny is kidnapped by former Latin American dictator Arius (Hedaya), who wants Matrix to restore him to power. Instead, Matrix sets out to take down the rogue leader and rescue his daughter.”
A ‘Commando’ Sequel Would Have Been Amazing
Alyssa Milano and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando20th Century Fox
Directed by Mark L. Lester and written by Steven E. de Souza, Commando is one of those 80s action movies that seemed ripe for a sequel. At one point, a rumor was floating around that the script for Commando 2 eventually morphed into the screenplay for the Bruce Willis hit, Die Hard, but that’s something that de Souza has debunked on numerous occasions.
Instead, Commando 2 would have seen an evolution of Schwarzenegger’s character. “I would look at how experiences change people,” de Souza told Bristol Bad Film Club nearly a decade ago. He added:
“So for Commando 2, we figured that Arnold, after blowing up half of Los Angeles, achieves some notoriety, retires from the army and, by the time the sequel occurs, is running a security firm. The plot would have seen him hired by a big corporation to oversee their security to protect their executives from being kidnapped, to stop people breaking into their building and to make sure their computers are secure.
“So he sets it up and hires the most dangerous people to be guards in the building and then, lo and behold, he discovers the people he’s working for are in the illegal arms business and the big corporation is simply a front.”
“The end of the movie would see Jenny (Milano) and Cindy (Chong), who is now a lawyer, trapped in the building and Arnold now has to defeat all the people he hired,” he continued. How great of a concept is that? Unfortunately, Schwarzenegger decided to move on to bigger and better things after Commando, so, for that and various other reasons, the sequel never came to fruition. What could have been, right?
Still, if you want to relive all the fun of the 1985 action classic, Commando is now streaming on HBO Max internationally, and for free on Tubi for viewers in the United States.
commando-poster.jpg
Release Date
October 4, 1985
Runtime
90 minutes
Director
Mark L. Lester
Writers
Jeph Loeb, Matthew Weisman, Steven E. de Souza
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