{"id":140379,"date":"2025-11-18T19:43:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T19:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/140379\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T19:43:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T19:43:10","slug":"arnold-schwarzenegger-and-sylvester-stallone-movies-are-too-iconic-to-remake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/140379\/","title":{"rendered":"Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone movies are too iconic to remake"},"content":{"rendered":"

A not very fun thing happened for director Edgar Wright and star Glen Powell last weekend.\u00a0The Running Man, despite a lot of hype, fell flat at the box office<\/a>, grossing a measly $17 million domestically and another $11 million internationally. While everyone involved took great pains to\u00a0separate\u00a0the film from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie it\u2019s technically a remake of (although it\u2019s more of another adaptation of the book<\/a>), it\u2019s yet another example of big-budget remakes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone movies falling flat at the box office. You\u2019d think Hollywood would have learned when\u00a0Total Recall and Conan the Barbarian\u00a0landed with a thud many years ago, but it seems like this is a painful lesson the town just needs to learn over and over again. While Arnold Schwarzenegger is being spared any new remakes\u2014for a while, anyway\u2014his classic action cohort Sylvester Stallone isn\u2019t so lucky.<\/p>\n

Indeed, there are two big-budget, Stallone-less continuations of franchises he built coming out next year. One is the gender-flipped\u00a0Cliffhanger\u00a0remake<\/a> with Lily James, and the other is a\u00a0Rambo\u00a0prequel directed by\u00a0Sisu\u2019s Jalmari Helander and starring Noah Centineo. While the\u00a0Cliffhanger\u00a0remake sounds like a worse idea on paper than the\u00a0Rambo\u00a0prequel, I actually think the latter is the one that could really be a disaster. For one thing, Stallone is still passionate about the character and has been trying to do his own prequel for years. It feels like disrespect not to involve him. He brilliantly passed the torch to Michael B. Jordan in the\u00a0Creed\u00a0movies, and in that respect they did everything right, as Jordan isn\u2019t playing Rocky\u2014he\u2019s Adonis Creed, his own character. Centineo will be playing\u00a0John Rambo.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s arguably an even bigger pitfall is that the movie will be set during the Vietnam War. Now, Helander has worked in a historical setting before, but if you watch either\u00a0Sisu\u00a0movie, both are black-and-white \u201cgood guys versus bad guys\u201d stories. You love watching Jorma Tommila\u2019s Aatami blow away Nazis in the first and Red Army Soviets in the killer sequel<\/a>. A movie set during the Vietnam War\u2014whose legacy many are still trying to reckon with\u2014seems more complex. It will have to be handled a lot differently than any of Helander\u2019s other movies. People call the\u00a0Rambo\u00a0movies a product of their time, but if you go back and revisit them, especially the first one, they are more nuanced than you remember. Stallone is a strong creative force, and a new take on Rambo\u2019s time in the Vietnam War sounds like something\u00a0he\u2019d\u00a0have the right perspective on. For Helander, my fear is that this young Rambo movie will just be a fun shoot-\u2019em-up (he\u2019s already promised it will be less dark<\/a> than the last few Rambo flicks), where in\u00a0First Blood, we see a man in John Rambo who\u2019s been broken by the terror of his service in Nam. A Young Rambo movie shouldn\u2019t be \u201cfun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, who knows? Helander could absolutely nail it\u2014and Centineo is a fine choice to play a younger version of a character originally played by Stallone. But the fact remains: outside of the\u00a0Creed\u00a0series, which did it right, none of these new versions of Arnold and Sly classics have worked. Should Hollywood bother? Let us know in the talkbacks.<\/p>\n

\"JoBlo<\/p>\n

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