Sylvester Stallone names the movie that almost ruined his career: “I wasn’t as diligent as I should have been”
Sylvester Stallone has been part of many incredible cinematic moments. Running up those steps in Rocky, breaking down in tears at the end of First Blood, sharing the screen with legends like Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Expendables series, Sly is baked into Hollywood’s DNA, but it hasn’t always been easy for him.
Stallone’s career went into a freefall at the beginning of the 2000s. A series of bad creative decisions – Get Carter, Driven, Avenging Angelo etc – led his stock to decrease massively. He was unable to fulfil his directorial ambitions, as a planned project about the rivalry between Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G got shelved, and the man who previously could do no wrong suddenly found himself incapable of doing anything right.
Thankfully, the action icon was able to recoup his reputation and now enjoys legendary status. In a conversation with Variety in 2019, he reflected on his darker days and explained why he thought his career had taken a dip. “I think it happened because I wasn’t as diligent as I should have been with making certain career choices,” he explained. “For example, I did a film called D-Tox, and it had a really good cast, but one week into the film the producers decided to change tack, and the film had a cloud over it. It sat on the shelf for two years, and so that was kind of the beginning of ‘Stallone is [over].’”
D-Tox, which came out in 2002, features Stallone alongside Tom Berenger, Polly Walker, Robert Patrick, Jeffrey Wright, and Kris Kristofferson. It was directed by Jim Gillespie, who also made I Know What You Did Last Summer, and features the ‘Rambo’ actor as an FBI agent on the hunt for a serial killer who murdered his former partner. Universal Pictures wasn’t happy with how it performed in initial test screenings, so it ordered a series of re-shoots. When those didn’t fix the problem, the movie was shelved entirely until DEJ Productions acquired the rights and released it under a new title, Eye See You.
When asked by Ain’t It Cool News why the film didn’t do very well, Stallone was straightforward in his response. “A film is a very delicate creature,” he explained. “Any adverse publicity or internal shake-up can upset the perception of – and studio confidence in – a feature. For some unknown reason the original producer pulled out and right away the film was considered damaged goods; by the time we ended filming there was trouble brewing on the set because of overages and creative concerns between the director and the studio. The studio let it sit on the shelf for many months and after over a year it was decided to do a re-shoot.”
He claimed that the film went down “okay” with test audiences, which is in contrast to other reports, and that Ron Howard lent a hand with the film’s post-production. “But the movie had the smell of death about it,” he said. “Actually, if you looked up, you could see celluloid buzzards circling as we lay there dying on the distributor’s floor.”
The finished product eventually received very poor reviews, but it’s unclear whether this was due to studio interference or if the movie was just plain rotten. It did little to assuage critics that Stallone’s career wasn’t on the decline, and the actor would have to wait a little while longer to be back in the movie world’s good graces.
