Hear Me Out: Is the ‘John Rambo’ prequel idea just crazy enough to work?
The announcement that Sylvester Stallone’s beloved killing machine John Rambo would return to action was met with a collective murmur, instead of a cathartic roar of victory.
This return will not include Stallone. Instead, it will come in the form of a prequel movie starring Noah Centineo of The Recruit fame as a young Rambo who is put through the meat grinder of the Vietnam War, which changes him forever.
To many die-hard Rambo fans, the fresh-faced Centineo is probably a tough sell, given that the 29-year-old is mainly known for the Netflix teen romcom series To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. However, he has been hand-picked by Millennium Media to take the lead in John Rambo, which will be helmed by Sisu director Jalmari Helander and written by Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani. They scripted Dwayne Johnson’s DC superhero misfire Black Adam, which featured Centineo in a supporting role.
It’s easy to be cynical about yet another recognised intellectual property being given the prequel/sequel/reboot treatment by a Hollywood system that seems terrified of original ideas. From this frame of reference, a Rambo prequel is largely redundant, as 1982’s classic First Blood already showed the audience that his horrific experiences in Vietnam traumatised the titular soldier.
Do we really need to see these experiences for ourselves when Stallone’s heartbreaking monologue at the end of that film paints a harrowing picture that any two-hour movie would struggle to live up to? No, we don’t.
Having said that, is a Rambo prequel inherently a terrible idea? I’d argue it isn’t. In a world where every IP under the sun is being exploited for all its worth, mining Rambo’s backstory makes a lot more sense than some of the other decisions being made in Hollywood. It’s something that Stallone himself has spoken about for years, and has actively developed at certain points, even co-developing the story for a prequel comic book entitled First Kill.
Obviously, Stallone has never been opposed to the idea of the sequel, given that he’s played Rocky Balboa eight times and Rambo five. Still, he’s always seemed genuinely passionate about exploring the origins of his second-most-famous character, most notably in 2019 when he told Screen Rant that he’d been noodling the idea of a prequel.
“I always thought of Rambo when he was 16 or 17—I hope they can do the prequel—he was the best person you could find,” Stallone explained, adding, “He was the captain of the team; he was the most popular kid in school; super athlete… The war is what changed him. If you saw him before, he was like the perfect guy.”
Three years later, the actor was still talking about this prequel. He told The Hollywood Reporter, “I think it’s going to happen. I wanted to do it like a Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam, where you drop young Rambo in there and he’s this outgoing guy, football captain, and then you see why he becomes Rambo.”
At that point, he indicated the studio preferred the idea of “a modern-day story where I pass the torch”, but the announcement of John Rambo certainly seems to suggest they’ve opted for something akin to his original pitch. Throw in a director like Helander, who admitted First Blood heavily inspired his gritty Finnish action epic Sisu, and that sounds like a recipe for something pretty cool.
Ultimately, it’s entirely possible that the prequel will turn out to be a dud, and yet another misjudged milking of a brand name people have fondness for. There have been more than enough of those over the last few years. However, sometimes things that sound like terrible ideas end up being anything but, with Liam Neeson’s The Naked Gun being a great recent example.
Did the world need a new Naked Gun in 2025? No, but Hollywood attracted the right creative people to the project and made something audiences seemed to love. Maybe John Rambo will be a similar case, or maybe it’ll make a liar out of me. Either way, I’m willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt and declare that it just might be crazy enough to work.
