With 11 Golden Raspberry Award wins from 31 nominations – including ‘Worst Actor of the Decade’ for the 1980’s and ‘Worst Actor of the Century’ – Sylvester Stallone knows a thing or two about making regrettable career choices.
Of course, he’s also a three-time Academy Award nominee, legendary action hero, accomplished filmmaker, and one of just two stars alongside Harrison Ford to have appeared in a number one box office hit in the United States in six consecutive decades, so his legacy has long since been secured.
And yet, it’s one of his very best and most popular movies that he was convinced had a curse laid upon it, which extended far beyond First Blood, causing him to suffer broken ribs when he launched himself into a tree. In fact, it was the entire production from start to finish that caused him such consternation.
In a career retrospective with Empire, Stallone described the process as “quite an interesting odyssey”. However, he did also state “that movie was cursed”, before putting an exclamation point on it by adding, “literally cursed”. Evidently, he wasn’t put off considering he’d reprise the role a further four times, but bringing John Rambo to the screen for the first time proved to be quite the daunting task.
When he read the first script, it became apparent why “nobody wanted to it”, with the actor having only ended up with the screenplay after “it had been through Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Jimmy Caan, Burt Reynolds, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino” before ending up on his desk.
The project had already been revised so many times that, in Stallone’s words, “there were 17 different screenplays”. Even at that, he pushed to have the ending changed, with Rambo initially intended to die. After getting his own way, the reshot conclusion fared much better with test audiences, made it into the final cut, and ended up gifting him with a secondary franchise to go along with Rocky.
Nobody wanted to make it, nobody seemed to know how to write it, a cavalcade of established names had already passed on the part, but Stallone opted to persevere. It wasn’t without its issues, but it turned out to be the right call in the end. As the saga wore on and became more about glistening biceps, bullets, and body counts, it became all too easy to forget that First Blood was an intimate, character-driven thriller.
Stallone doesn’t even kill anybody in the film, with the only death by his hand happening on a technicality when he throws a rock at a helicopter and causes a marksman to fall to his doom. By the time he bowed out in Rambo: Last Blood, though, his cumulative total of enemies dispatched had risen to over 250.
