The three movies Sylvester Stallone will always regret not making: “I was just too lazy”
As he’s repeatedly proven over the last five decades, most of the time, all you need to do is whisper the word “sequel” within 100 feet of Sylvester Stallone, and he’ll come running.
Apart from maybe Vin Diesel, there isn’t an actor in the business more synonymous with returning to the well than Stallone, who propelled himself to self-made superstardom by writing the screenplay and playing the lead role in Rocky, only to ignore those early Marlon Brando comparisons entirely.
In his breakthrough role, Sly showcased a naturalism, screen presence, and magnetism that saw him become the latest in a long line of thespians to be compared to the ultimate method man, but once he realised that getting jacked and shooting people in the face could earn him more money, he pivoted and never looked back.
Throughout his career, he’s played the ‘Italian Stallion’ eight times, made five outings as John Rambo, headlined four Expendables flicks, and the Escape Plan trilogy, which is barely the tip of the iceberg when you extend his fondness for franchises to the ones he boarded after they’d already started.
That saw him appear in the second and third Guardians of the Galaxy films, play the villain in the third Spy Kids, direct the woeful Saturday Night Fever follow-up, Staying Alive, cameo in the French action comedy Taxi 3, and voice an anthropomorphised shark of limited intelligence in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad.
With that in mind, it makes perfect sense for the three movies Stallone has always regretted to have one thing in common: none of them would have had an original bone in their body, and the sequel-mad veteran continues to rue the day he didn’t load up his filmography with even more reprisals.
“My biggest regret is that I didn’t do Cobra as a franchise,” he lamented. “Tango & Cash and Demolition Man, I felt each one of those had at least three movies in them. But I was just, I guess, maybe too lazy. But I didn’t do it. But I felt those films had potential to go on.”
1986’s Cobra was shite, to be fair, but it was a huge success at the box office and has since become a cult favourite among genre aficionados for its endless gratuitous violence. Tango & Cash was a nightmarish production that burned through directors like there was no tomorrow, and he did try to get a second instalment off the ground, which didn’t get very far because Kurt Russell simply wasn’t interested.
Mel Brooks might hate Demolition Man with a passion, but a lot of other people don’t. Stallone did announce that a sequel was in development back in May 2020, but after six years of absolutely hee haw forward momentum, never mind the fact he’s not far away from turning 80 years old, it’s probably not going to happen, either.
