“It was just overblown”: Sylvester Stallone on why ‘First Blood’ was a complete failure
It’s almost impossible to predict a film’s success. Even when everyone involved gives their all to create the best possible product, it’s often a miracle that any major film makes it to a wide release. Just a few strange decisions or editing missteps can turn a potentially phenomenal movie into a disjointed disaster. Despite having some of the greatest action-thrillers to his name, Sylvester Stallone once admitted that he believed this particular iconic film was destined to singlehandedly destroy his career.
Then again, Stallone has had a big hand in every iconic movie he has starred in. He has been known as the classic elder statesman in The Expendables franchise, and thanks to his persistence, the Rocky franchise became one of the best stories of perseverance anyone has ever seen.
But the lion’s share of all great action movies has more to do with the characters behind every punch. Anyone can film a bunch of action scenes and hope to God that they connect in the editing bay, but looking through everything from Die Hard to Rocky to even the Terminator franchise, people latch onto the people who feel real and would live on long after the credits start rolling.
Compared to all of the other films that Stallone has been in, though, the Rambo franchise is still among the most bloodthirsty characters he has ever portrayed. While stories of people with military expertise are nothing new, seeing him lay waste to a small town in First Blood is still one of the most entertaining adventures of the 1980s.
If you look at everything that was coming out around that time, though, seeing this kind of action felt like violence for violence’s sake. People had become used to action stars in the vein of Indiana Jones that had been chasing after architecture, so seeing trailers with a man wielding a machine gun in the middle of small-town America was bound to become everything a 13-year-old male could want and an absolute nightmare for parents.
Since the original cut of the film was nearly three hours, Stallone felt that he made a film that no one was going to see, saying, “You know, that movie was a complete failure. That movie was so bad I wanted to buy it back and burn it; that’s not a joke. I put that in Variety; it was that bad. Because it was just overblown, over-long, and I had never seen an actor attacking his own country, it was just very odd. That’s why 11 people passed on the film.”
Considering how much goes on in the 85-minute version, though, there’s a lot more left to everyone’s imagination. Since half of the film is centred around John Rambo evading police on an ongoing manhunt, fleshing out the action scenes would have made people lose a shred of sympathy that they had for him.
Although John Rambo might not be the deepest character that Stallone ever had to perform, seeing him kicking ass and taking names is really all that the audiences could ask for. It’s never easy to make any action movie, but it’s even harder to judge whether it’s going to stand the test of time like this.
