{"id":155708,"date":"2025-09-20T02:52:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-20T02:52:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/155708\/"},"modified":"2025-09-20T02:52:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T02:52:07","slug":"sylvester-stallone-wants-to-play-an-18-year-old-ai-de-aged-rambo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/155708\/","title":{"rendered":"Sylvester Stallone wants to play an 18-year-old, AI-de-aged Rambo"},"content":{"rendered":"

We don\u2019t usually think of Sylvester Stallone as a comedic powerhouse, outside of situations in which his opponents must stop, lest his mother open fire. But the \u201cHollywood Ambassador<\/a>\u201d did float an idea in interviews this week<\/a> that we would\u00a0absolutely\u00a0like to see executed, even if not for exactly the same reasons that Stallone does: A\u00a0Rambo\u00a0prequel starring Sly himself, with AI used to de-age him back to a spritely 18.<\/p>\n

Stallone was asked about this possibility while doing the press rounds for the latest season of his Paramount+ series Tulsa King, where he claimed that \u201cAI is sophisticated enough to go through Saigon to see [Rambo] at 18 years old and basically use the same image. So it isn\u2019t as big a stretch.\u201d (He also notes, possibly more accurately, that \u201cEveryone thought I was crazy\u201d when he broached this idea.)<\/p>\n

Now, admittedly, Stallone\u2019s early works have entered the phase where Hollywood is looking to mine them aggressively for nostalgia purposes: A couple of weeks ago, Noah Centineo was reportedly attached to play a Young Rambo in a film adaptation<\/a>, and there\u2019s a making-of-Rocky\u00a0movie in the works from Peter Farrelly. (Stallone expressed some bafflement at that one, since he wasn\u2019t consulted about the project, which will star Antonio Ippolino as a young Stallone: \u201cI was shocked to read [about] it,\u201d he said in a podcast interview with The Playlist. \u201cI have zero to do with it.\u201d)<\/p>\n

All that being said, the idea of a computer-assisted Stallone playing John Rambo at 18 is so incredibly fraught that our brains can\u2019t stop poking at it, in much the manner of a sore tooth. Let\u2019s leap past the basic point that, Stallone\u2019s confidence aside, Hollywood de-aging is still pretty suspect, even when used to knock 30 years off a well-known actor<\/a>\u2014let alone the 60 you\u2019d need to do here. There\u2019s also the simple comparison that happens when you look at Stallone\u2019s body in 2025 versus his own back in 1982, when he filmed First Blood. (The first, and now most off-model, of the Rambo\u00a0films.) Part of what makes that movie work is that for the first part of its runtime, John Rambo presents as a wiry, but fairly normal-looking guy, who just happens\u00a0to be extremely good at killing people once the very dumb local cops start jumping up and down on his trauma buttons.\u00a0First Blood\u00a0is already an outlier in the franchise it spawned\u2014something that would only get weirder if it was sitting on the timeline right next to a prequel about an 18-year-old digital beefcake formed from 250 pounds of computer meat singlehandedly killing his way through Vietnam.<\/p>\n

Sylvester Stallone’s alleged bad behavior pushes extras out of Tulsa King<\/a>Sylvester Stallone’s 18 best (and 5 worst) movies<\/a><\/p>\n

Still, Stallone says, there\u2019s simply no other alternative when tackling the younger days of an iconic character. After all, didn\u2019t audiences teach him that with his 2000 remake of Get Carter? (Leaving aside that critics drubbed Stephen Kay\u2019s movie more for its general lifelessness than because Stallone couldn\u2019t compare to a 1970s Michael Caine.) \u201cIt\u2019s very, very hard,\u201d Stallone said of Centineo stepping into his shoes. \u201d He may do a stellar job, but you\u2019re overcoming this because I went through it with Get Carter. Everyone loves the original, and then you\u2019re always fighting that prejudice.\u201d Better to simply bring on the computer beef, instead.<\/p>\n

[via\u00a0Variety<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We don\u2019t usually think of Sylvester Stallone as a comedic powerhouse, outside of situations in which his opponents…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-155708","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}