The 1997 movie that convinced Sylvester Stallone his career was “going the way of the dodo bird”
Conventional Hollywood wisdom suggests that any actor who makes enough bad movies and box office bombs will eventually see their star power completely eroded before they finally become yesterday’s news, but nobody bothered to tell Sylvester Stallone.
It’s remarkable that he’s managed to remain a household name for over 50 years, because there aren’t many stars in the business who’ve lent their name to such a high volume of shite. For a long time, Stallone was synonymous with bad cinema, but somehow, he’s always clawed his way out of a hole.
Anyone else with 35 Razzie nominations, which includes a dozen wins, including prizes for ‘Worst Actor of the Decade’ for the 1980s and ‘Worst Actor of the Century’ for every feature made between 1900 and 1999, would become an outcast, a laughing stock, and a forgotten relic of a bygone age.
Not Stallone, though, because he simply refuses to disappear from the limelight. He’s come perilously close to slipping out of relevance on more than one occasion, and you can almost taste the irony that the first acclaimed and profitable picture he’d made in years is the one he holds up as a death knell.
After recovering from the abysmal Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!, with the back-to-back successes of Cliffhanger and Demolition Man, Sly went off the rails again. The Specialist, Judge Dredd, Assassins, and Daylight were all savaged by critics and underperformed in theatres, and the most radical change of pace he’d made in decades convinced him that his glory days were well and truly over.
James Mangold’s Cop Land saw the usually buff and vascular action hero pack on the pounds to play a three-dimensional, well-rounded, honest-to-god character for the first time in forever, and it reminded everyone why Rocky had many calling him the second coming of Marlon Brando two decades previously when Rocky debuted, because with the right material, the man can act.
He received more praise for his performance than he had in forever, and the slow-burning crime drama recouped its budget more than four times over in ticket sales. And yet, it didn’t have the desired effect. “I loved the film, but it actually worked in reverse,” Stallone explained. “It was pretty good critically, but the fact that it didn’t do a lot of box office, again, it formed the opinion that I had my moment.”
After Cop Land, the Rocky and Rambo figurehead was equal parts convinced and concerned that his career was “going the way of the dodo bird and the Tasmanian tiger,” or, to put an even finer point on it, his initial reaction was, “So, I’m gone.” Of course, like a jacked, geriatric cockroach, Stallone’s Hollywood career cannot be killed.
He continued making shit films for a while, and it wouldn’t be until 2006’s Rocky Balboa that new wind was finally breathed into his sails. Admittedly, the shit films continue, as most of his recent work has handily displayed, but if he hasn’t been pushed out of Tinseltown by now, it isn’t going to happen.
