On Mars, Quaid evades Richter and, following a note from Hauser, travels to Venusville, a district populated by humans and those mutated by air pollution and solar radiation within the cheaply built domes protecting the colony.

[9] The development of Total Recall began in 1974, when producer Ronald Shusett purchased the adaptation rights to science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's 1966 short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" for $1,000.

[19] Although studios deemed Shusett and O'Bannon's script an ambitious and brilliant idea, it was essentially considered unfilmable, in part because of the extensive special effects and high budget that would be required.

[17][22] In his finished script, Quaid's true identity is Chairman Mandrell, the dictator of Earth who, following a failed assassination attempt on his life, is convinced by Mars Administrator Cohaagen to confront the organization that suppressed his memory.

[25] Shusett described Cronenberg's work as bringing the film back to Dick's original short story, whereas they wanted an adventure closer to "Raiders of the Lost Ark go to Mars".

[31] Around this time, writer Gary Goldman was offered an opportunity to refine the script, but he turned it down to focus on his own project, called Warrior, that he was working on alongside director Paul Verhoeven at Warner Bros.

[13][34] He liked the script and agreed to pursue it alongside producer Joel Silver while filming Predator (1987), but the project remained unrealized due to its prohibitive budget and because De Laurentiis did not think Schwarzenegger was right for the lead role.

[14][16] Following DEG's bankruptcy, Schwarzenegger convinced Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar, co-owners of the independent film studio Carolco Pictures, with whom he had made Red Heat (1988), to purchase the rights for $3 million, including pre-production costs.

[36] Schwarzenegger was given substantial influence over the project: he retained Shusett as a screenwriter and co-producer alongside producer Buzz Feitshans, and oversaw script revisions, casting decisions, and set construction.

[34] He requested Goldman be brought in to help with rewrites, as well as some core personnel from RoboCop, including cinematographer Jost Vacano, production designer William Sandell, and special effects artist Rob Bottin.

[45] The meek clerk Quail was renamed Quaid, to avoid referencing then-vice president Dan Quayle, and became a muscle-bound construction worker, while fight scenes were rewritten to include more feats of strength and less martial arts or running.

[60] Schwarzenegger was known for his pranks on the set, such as arranging styrofoam snowball fights and water pistol battles during dinners as well as booking parties to reward the crew for the six-day working weeks and practical stunts.

[39][68] The film also had to be trimmed to remove violent content and gore, including a longer version of Benny's death, to avoid an X rating, which would have restricted attendance to audience members over the age of 17.

Dick Tracy was predicted to dominate the box office, and films such as Another 48 Hrs., Back to the Future Part III, Days of Thunder, Die Hard 2, RoboCop 2, and Total Recall were expected to perform well based on their brand recognition and star appeal.

The importance of domestic box office grosses was also decreasing as studios increasingly earned profits from home media releases, television rights, and markets outside of the United States and Canada.

He contacted Peter Guber, the head of Tri-Star's owner Sony Pictures Studios, who contracted a different company, Cimmaron/Bacon/O'Brien, to produce a new trailer focusing on the action and special effects; it fared much better with audiences and attracted praise from industry professionals, such as Joel Silver.

[104][106] Gene Siskel and Peter Travers believed the latter half of the film, after Quaid reaches Mars, to be where Total Recall became "mechanical", abandoning logic and artistic ambition for excessive action and violence.

[111][112] The Washington Post's review compared it unfavorably with the Sylvester Stallone action film Cobra (1986), saying it was disappointing in its overuse of violence and abandonment of cynicism and creativity for machoism and misogyny.

[u] Reviews praised Schwarzenegger for playing against his public action hero image by portraying a confused, vulnerable, and sympathetic character, with Roger Ebert considering him vital to the film's success.

[103][109] Some reviews considered the role to be beyond Schwarzenegger's acting abilities, describing him as "unusually oafish ... a cross between Frankenstein's monster, a hockey puck, and Colonel Klink", incapable of generating a romantic connection with Stone's or Ticotin's characters.

[w] Shusett and Goldman did not like aspects of Total Recall, believing it was overly long and failed to make the audience care about the mutants, as well as disliking the excessive swearing, violence, and deaths.

They also thought the special effect of Schwarzenegger's and Ticotin's swelling heads went on too long and, alongside Verhoeven, they regretted the rushed post-production and lack of test screenings to solicit feedback that could have led to a "tighter" re-edit on the third act.

Written by Vince Moore with art by Cezar Rezak, the series' narrative continues on from the end of the film, depicting Quaid dealing with a Mars still in chaos following Cohaagen's death.

Schwarzenegger identified himself as a conservative and supporter of U.S. president Ronald Reagan, which Vest opined made him "an unusual choice to portray the protagonist who liberates Mars from Cohaagen's dictatorship".

The mutants on Mars are the result of early colonists exposed to a toxic atmosphere because of cheap domes, and their offspring still serve Cohaagen, meaning the authorities have escaped any responsibility for their involvement.

[148] Vest believed Total Recall did not offer a positive representation of minorities, as Benny, the only important African American character, collaborates with Cohaagen and helps assassinate the Martian freedom fighter Kuato.

Vest believed that his repeated references to having multiple children "reinforced stereotypes of African American men as irresponsible and promiscuous", and that "his alliance with Cohaagen presents the character as untrustworthy, selfish, and corrupt".

[174] In a 2012 retrospective, Vulture wrote that despite its anachronistic aspects, such as outdated technology, Total Recall remained relevant, particularly in its themes of the oppressed fighting back against their oppressors, which was compared to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

[183] In 2020, The Guardian wrote that, with hindsight, Total Recall formed the middle of Verhoeven's unofficial science fiction action film trilogy about authoritarian governance, following RoboCop and preceding Starship Troopers (1997).

Unable to make progress on that project, he and Shusett worked together on adapting The Minority Report into a Total Recall sequel in 1993, depicting Quaid as the head of an organization that uses mutants with precognition abilities to predict and stop crimes before they happen.