“I’ll be back” is one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most famous catchphrases, but its meaning and usage subtly changed over time. We take a look back. In 1987’s The Running Man, one of the most memorable catchphrases of its era got a rare rejoinder. Playing convict and futuristic killer gameshow contestant Ben Richards, Arnold Schwarzenegger got ... Arnold Schwarzenegger | The life and times of “I’ll be back”
“I’ll be back” is one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most famous catchphrases, but its meaning and usage subtly changed over time. We take a look back.
In 1987’s The Running Man, one of the most memorable catchphrases of its era got a rare rejoinder. Playing convict and futuristic killer gameshow contestant Ben Richards, Arnold Schwarzenegger got to trot out his famous line: “I’ll be back.”
But then host Damon Killian (Richard Dawson) immediately followed it with the clever retort: “Only in a rerun.”
The exchange was perfectly of a piece with the film’s premise – in which a gladiatorial television show is used to keep the masses entertained and pacified – and the self-aware tone that underpinned most of Schwarzenegger’s output in the 1980s and 1990s. Taking a leaf out of James Bond’s book, the Austrian Oak played appropriately outsized heroes who were always ready with a quip, especially if it involved someone’s death – “Let off some steam, Bennett,” and “Stick around” immediately spring to mind.
Schwarzenegger’s “I’ll be back” catchphrase was also a nod to the understanding that, while he played characters with various names in movies with different premises, it was Arnold everyone had come to see. And whether he was a retired soldier (Commando), a murderous cyborg (The Terminator) or a gameshow contestant, it was still basically the same old Arnie underneath the costume and makeup effects.
As famous as the line is, however, it wasn’t used in every Schwarzenegger film – far from it, in fact. Outside the Terminator franchise, where it originated, “I’ll be back”, or variations of it, is only uttered by Arnold in six other movies. That’s not an insignificant number, but it’s a relatively small percentage when weighed against the 50 or so films he’s appeared in over a career lasting some 55 years and counting.
Some of Schwarzenegger’s most popular films don’t contain the line – and of the ones that do, it’s telling how its meaning and usage changed as the years went by.
Come again?
You probably know the line’s origins already. In writer-director James Cameron’s original script, the Terminator strides into a police station and asks the sergeant behind the counter if he can see a woman named Sarah Connor. Unlike the audience, the cop at the desk has no idea he’s talking to a time-travelling killing machine, and dismissively tells the imposing man in front of him to go wait on a bench.
The Terminator pauses for a moment to take in the surroundings, then says, “I’ll come back.”
During filming, Cameron decided to change the line to a more active-sounding “I’ll be back.” This initially caused problems for Schwarzenegger. With German being his first language, he felt uncomfortable with uttering contractions – to him, it felt more natural to say, “I will be back.”
(This may be the origin of that old throwaway Simpsons gag, where the series’ Arnold analogue Rainier Wolfcastle struggles to say “Up and at ‘em!” and instead says “UP AND AT THEM” at increasing volume.”)
After a few takes, Schwarzenegger got the line spot-on, and the result was a classic moment in a movie full of them: seconds after the Terminator says it, he’s crashed into the police station in a stolen car and gone on a bullet-strewn rampage. Audiences loved it.
The Terminator transformed both Cameron and Schwarzenegger’s careers. Although both had made movies before, this was the one that truly made their names in Hollywood. Cameron went straight off and made Aliens, released in 1986. Offers came flooding in for Schwarzenegger, and about a year after he finished working on The Terminator, he was making the action film Commando, released in October 1985.
Something significant happened between The Terminator’s release in October 1984 and the filming of Commando, which began in March the following year, however. Strangers kept coming up to Schwarzenegger and demanding he “say the line” from The Terminator.
The first time it happened, Schwarzenegger was in Manhattan’s Central Park. “This guy comes up and says, ‘Say the line!’” the star later told The Hollywood Reporter.
Schwarzenegger, clearly sensed he was onto something, because near the start of the finished film, he tells Vernon Wells’ villain, “I’ll be back, Bennett!”
Even more so than The Terminator, Commando defined the vintage Schwarzenegger action movie: its set-pieces were loud and over-the-top, and interspersed with those above-mentioned one-liners.
Although less successful commercially, The Running Man – the third time Schwarzenegger trotted out his catchphrase – was tonally similar to Commando. The star was surrounded by similarly hefty antagonists, and its various fights and deaths came studded with the occasional quip (“Sub-Zero… now plain zero!”).
During this particularly busy phase of his career, Schwarzenegger didn’t exactly overuse his fan-favourite line, though.
He didn’t say it in the gritty action thriller Raw Deal (1986) or in Predator (1987), even though the latter came packed with all sorts of other quotable lines (“Get to the chopper!”). He didn’t say it in Walter Hill’s 1988 action comedy, Red Heat, even though there were at least a couple of places where it could have been shoe-horned in.
His other, far more successful 1988 comedy, Twins, did contain the catchphrase, however – Schwarzenegger says it rather menacingly to a doctor. After that, his first films of 1990 – the high-concept comedy Kindergarten Cop and Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-violent sci-fi Total Recall – all did without the line.
Logically enough, the big-budget 1991 sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day has its heroic iteration of the cyborg murmur “I’ll be back,” though this time it’s a moment of reassurance rather than a veiled threat. Schwarzenegger is no longer the heartless villain, but an unlikely father figure.
By the early 1990s, though, the brand of outsized action popularised by Schwarzenegger and his contemporaries was about to be replaced by a new type of movie. In fact, James Cameron may have inadvertently signalled the end of one era and the beginning of another when he made Terminator 2: it contained a huge movie star (Schwarzenegger was paid a huge sum to reprise the title role) but the bigger talking point was its visual effects.
Two years later, the Schwarzenegger action vehicle Last Action Hero went up against Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in a battle for the summer box office. Despite an absurdly huge marketing campaign, which included plastering the film’s title on the side of a space rocket, Last Action Hero lost, and Jurassic Park – with its cutting-edge CGI dinosaurs – was that year’s cultural phenomenon.
Last Action Hero also marked the peak of “I’ll be back.” A meta parody of 80s action films, it sees Schwarzenegger – in the guise of LA cop Jack Slater, who is himself a character in a series of action movies – drop the catchphrase no fewer than three times.
The relative financial failure of that film – not to mention its critical pummelling – hit Schwarzenegger hard. “I can’t tell you how upset I was,” he later said in the Netflix documentary series, Arnold. “It hurts you. It hurts your feelings. It’s embarrassing.”
In the same documentary, his old friend James Cameron said, “He sounded like he was in bed crying. He took it as a deep blow to his brand. I think it really shook him.”
Schwarzenegger bounced back a year later with another film in partnership with Cameron: the James Bond-inspired action thriller, True Lies. Given it was a re-teaming of two people who’d made the Terminator films such hits, it might have made sense, in a fan-baiting sort of way, for Schwarzenegger’s hero Harry Tasker to sneak “I’ll be back” in there. Perhaps tellingly, he didn’t.
In fact, Schwarzenegger didn’t repeat his catchphrase again for a full seven years after Last Action Hero’s release. He made numerous films in the interim – Junior, Eraser, Jingle All The Way, Batman & Robin, End Of Days – but none of them contained the line.
It was in 2000’s The 6th Day that the actor returned to his old utterance, though even here it was changed to a less certain-sounding “I might be back.”
The self-assuredness of Schwarzenegger’s peak had, it seemed, been replaced by a hint of self-doubt.
He played a cyborg for a third time in 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, and here too the line was changed up a little – to “She’ll be back”, referring to the film’s female-presenting killing machine, played by Kristanna Loken.
Don’t look back in anger
By this stage, Schwarzenegger’s gaze shifted away from Hollywood stardom and towards politics. Following a couple of brief movie appearances, he concentrated on his job as Governor of California from 2004 to 2010. And by the time he decided to make movies again, it was in a radically different cinema landscape from the one that made him a star all those years earlier.
He was among an ensemble of ageing action heroes in 2012’s The Expendables 2, where his catchphrase was jokingly batted back at him by co-star Bruce Willis (“You’ve been back enough!”).
The line’s present in the two Terminator films Schwarzenegger made in the 2010s – Genisys and Dark Fate – both feature an “I’ll be back,” though in the latter, it’s handed off to Sarah Connor (a returning Linda Hamilton). Instead, Schwarzenegger’s character – a T-800 cyborg named Carl – has a more downbeat variation: “I won’t be back.”
Although it began life in a dark and bloody thriller laced with both sci-fi and horror, “I’ll be back” came to exemplify the kinds of colourful, almost pop-art movies Schwarzenegger made after The Terminator – and like any era, it couldn’t last forever. Certainly, Schwarzenegger didn’t try to revive the catchphrase in any of the non-Terminator films he made after his stint as governor. (It gets a mention in his Netflix action show, Fubar, but even here it’s quickly dismissed.)
Besides, as the 1980s have faded from view, other one-liners from Schwarzenegger’s heyday have arguably become as famous as that one from The Terminator. The Austrian Oak appeared to recognise this himself.
In the spring of 2014, the actor was on a promotional tour for one of his comeback movies: the grim and grisly action thriller, Sabotage, directed by David Ayer. It didn’t do well at all, but Schwarzenegger, hard-working to the last, went around and plugged it for all it was worth.
During a press screening that year, he made a surprise appearance in a London cinema and briefly introduced the film before all but jogging out of the room. As he did so, he suddenly paused as though he’d almost forgotten something.
Turning to the audience, he smiled, raised a finger and said, “Oh! And remember guys… get to the chopper!”
