The movie Sylvester Stallone thought would kill his career: “We tried to buy it back”
With the 50th anniversary of Rocky fast approaching, Sylvester Stallone has shown incredible longevity to remain a major name in Hollywood, even if there have been plentiful missteps along the way.
As the creator of the iconic boxing franchise, the frontman of the five-film Rambo series, and the mastermind behind The Expendables, there’s always been a steady stream of sequel work to keep him busy. On the other side of the coin, his half-century in the spotlight has been repeatedly blighted by a string of dismal flops, securing his status as a performative record-breaker for all the wrong reasons.
He might be a three-time Academy Award nominee and a Golden Globe-winning performer and filmmaker, but there’s nobody in the history of the Golden Raspberry Awards to have been nominated for or won more trophies than Stallone. His haul of 12 victories from 34 nominations includes ‘Worst Actor of the Decade’ for the 1990s and ‘Worst Actor of the Century’, not that it’s done a thing to knock him off his perch.
And yet, the film Stallone was so convinced was going to ruin his career he tried to destroy any evidence that it even existed endures as not only one of his best-ever starring vehicles, but a stone-cold classic of action cinema anchored by one of his finest acting performances.
To be fair, nobody wanted to star in the adaptation of First Blood before Stallone signed on, with virtually every big-name leading man in the business taking a look at the script and declining. That didn’t put off the ‘Italian Stallion’, though, even if he was genuinely concerned that his post-Rocky success was about to blow up in his face.
In an interview with Howard Stern, Stallone was convinced his debut as John Rambo was a disaster waiting to happen, which does beg the question as to why he agreed to star in the first place. He clearly wasn’t satisfied with the initial version, anyway, swearing on his children’s lives that he tried to purchase the negatives with the express purpose of wiping First Blood off the face of the celluloid map.
“I looked at this. I’m going, ‘This is a career killer’. This film, when we did it, it was so bad – at least I thought, and even my manager – we both went out, I think we both retched together in the alley,” he said. “We tried to buy it back and burn the negative. First Blood, on my children, we tried to buy it back and burn the negative.”
Of course, First Blood was the recipient of widespread acclaim, recouped its budget almost ten times over at the box office, and gave rise to four sequels. And to think, Stallone’s career could have turned out markedly different had he followed through on his original plan to set the film ablaze in shame and embarrassment.
Watch the trailer for the classic action flick First Blood below.
