The Oscar-winning Harrison Ford movie Sylvester Stallone will always regret turning down: “Killed me”
Even though he’s still a household name, not to mention the star of a hit streaming series that’s been renewed for a fourth season, it’s fair to say that things aren’t going swimmingly for Sylvester Stallone on the big screen.
While it would be foolish to assume that a guy who’s pushing 80 years old would still have his pick of the parts, as he did in his 1980s heyday, it’s also not inaccurate to say that his choices in recent years haven’t been great, and he doesn’t even have the Rocky franchise to fall back on after Michael B Jordan’s feature-length directorial debut, Creed III, unceremoniously kicked ‘The Italian Stallion’ to the kerb.
A voice-only role in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad? Bombed at the box office. The fourth Expendables flick? Bombed at the box office. Samaritan? Delayed for almost two years and didn’t make much of an impact on Prime Video when it was finally released. Armor and Alarum? Sent straight-to-video, and neither of them could scrape together a decent review to save their lives.
In fact, you’d have to go all the way back to 2013’s Escape Plan to find the last time Stallone appeared in a movie that wasn’t part of the Rocky, Rambo, Expendables, or Guardians of the Galaxy franchises that didn’t flop, and even that film underperformed relative to the hype, considering it was the long-awaited two-hander that pitted him opposite his arch-nemesis turned close friend, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Back when he was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, though, Sly was batting away plum roles. He turned down the leading role in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, which won Jon Voight an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’, as well as Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, Beverly Hills Cop, Romancing the Stone, and Face/Off, to name just a few.
Another part he’s always regretted turning down is John Book, the dogged detective tasked to protect an Amish woman and her son in Peter Weir’s Witness. Harrison Ford didn’t hesitate and delivered the performance that earned him his one and only Oscar nomination for ‘Best Actor’, leaving Stallone to rue the day.
“Witness killed me,” he admitted to The Hollywood Reporter. “Witness was a mistake.” The noir thriller claimed two Oscars for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ and ‘Best Film Editing’, and amassed a further five nods in addition to Ford’s, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ for Weir.
At the time, he probably didn’t think much of it, since his 1985 was hardly a washout. The action icon headlined Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rocky IV within five months of each other, which gave him top billing in the second and third highest-grossing movies of the year, behind only Back to the Future.
On the other side of the coin, Witness was a critical darling and Oscar winner, but his sequels were not. Rambo’s return won him the Razzie for ‘Worst Actor’, Rocky’s latest bout netted him ‘Worst Director’, and the script for the former, co-written with James Cameron, landed him ‘Worst Screenplay’. Sure, they were profitable, but he really wishes he’d starred in the other one instead.
