Written by Ron Harris
08 July 2015


What's Your Favorite Arnold Movie?

You Tell Us



With the fifth installment of the Terminator franchise, Terminator Genisys, now playing in theaters starring bodybuilding’s Numero Uno son, Arnold Schwarzenegger it seems timely to ask what is your favorite Arnold movie. Let us know on the MD Forum:

1) Your favorite Arnold movie?

2) When you saw it.

3) Favorite lines and scenes from the movie or any of Arnold’s movies?

 My favorite is Pumping Iron which I saw late one night on PBS when I was 10 years old, and the charismatic Austrian with the build of a superhero was one of the first images I ever saw that made me want to transform my own body. It was his string of blockbuster movies in the 1980s and 1990s that truly reached out to hundreds of millions of young men around the world and inspired them to pick up the iron in hopes of becoming muscular action heroes themselves. I asked a few of the Team MD athletes which Arnold movie had the biggest influence on them.

 Branch Warren

 “Pumping Iron” and “Conan the Barbarian” are two favorites of mine. I was probably about 14 when I saw both of them, and I was just getting into the weights and had started buying bodybuilding magazines. Both of those movies totally motivated the heck out of me. “Pumping Iron” was obviously the movie that put bodybuilding on the map, and Arnold made bodybuilding cool. Until then, a lot of people used to laugh at bodybuilders and the sport, but Arnold was the man. “Conan”was like a comic book that came to life, thanks to Arnold. He was just bad-ass, with the muscles, the long hair and the accent. Nobody else on earth could have been Conan, and that movie is a classic.

 Dennis Wolf

 I don’t think too many other guys will say this, but the first Arnold movie I ever saw was “The Running Man.” I was still living in the USSR and maybe in second grade when it came out on VHS. At that time, the only way we could see Western movies like that was to go to these rooms where they would have a TV and a VCR set up, with chairs for 10-15 people. You paid a little bit of money and you could watch the movie. I don’t think it was Arnold at his best physically in a movie, but as a kid I was still very impressed. A little bit later I saw “Terminator 2” the same way. I didn’t see the first “Terminator” until I was about 13 and living in Germany.

 Dexter Jackson

 My favorite Arnold movie was “Predator.” I love good action movies, and that was a classic. You had Arnold, Carl Weathers, who played Apollo Creed in the “Rocky” movies, and even Jesse “The Body” Ventura, all running around the jungle with machine guns, hunting and being hunted by this giant bad-ass alien with tons of alien high-tech weapons. That was the time when Arnold was doing what he did best in movies, just straight-up kicking ass.

 Justin Compton

 I love all of Arnold’s action movies. My personal favorite is “Eraser,” which oddly enough doesn’t get as much love from his fans as you would think. All the “Terminator” movies were classics, and I have them all on DVD. The first Arnold movie I ever saw was “Predator,” and that was all I needed. I was hooked from there. Nobody played a bad-ass quite like Arnold did.

 Victor Martinez

 To me, “Conan the Barbarian” was such an epic story, and for a kid like me who grew up reading comic books and admiring superheroes, it was just the best thing ever. I actually watched it again the other day, and the story is straight out of Greek mythology. The hero loses his family, who are murdered by an evil villain. Then he goes from captivity to being trained to be a great gladiator, and eventually sets off on a quest to avenge his family’s murder. And of course, he filmed it not long after his seventh Mr. Olympia win in 1980, so you see him in great shape.

 It’s funny how I notice a lot of things now watching him that I didn’t back when I was a kid. From some angles, he looks big as hell; from other angles, he looks more athletic and lean. You can even tell which scenes were filmed on high-carb days! There’s that one fight scene in the pit when he was a gladiator where he crosses the swords and puts his arms straight out after he kills his opponent, and you know he did a few sets of push-ups right before they shot that!

 Jose Raymond

I was 9 when I saw “Commando,” which was one of Arnold’s best action movies of his entire career. That was in 1985, and Arnold still carried most of his size. He had a ton of classic one-liners in it, like “Remember when I said I’d kill you last? I lied.” But my favorite line was from a cop or a security guard when his character, John Matrix, was in a fight with the bad guys in a mall and the security guard described Arnold’s character over his radio: “Attention all units, emergency on theater level, suspect 6-foot-2, brown hair. He is one gigantic motherfucker.”