“I can get my own yacht”: when Arnold Schwarzenegger rejected Sylvester Stallone’s olive branch
Even though they’ve long since put their legendary rivalry behind them, the bad blood between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone during their battle for action cinema supremacy was so petty and childish that it became integral to the folklore of the genre’s beefiest behemoths.
The latter may have initially gained fame as the Academy Award-nominated writer and leading man of ‘Best Picture’ winner Rocky before showcasing a new side of himself in stripped-down backwoods thriller First Blood, but it was the world of bulging biceps and rippling pecs Stallone ended up calling home.
Unfortunately for him, there was already a hulking Austrian with an impenetrable accent carving out that very niche for himself, and they each operated under the mindset that the genre wasn’t big enough for the both of them. It was, as ticket sales and respective multi-million salaries made clear, but the pair were constantly at each other’s throats regardless.
They’d throw barbs at each other in the media, mock each other’s failures, and in one of Hollywood’s greatest-ever trolling jobs Schwarzenegger leaked out his entirely fabricated interest in the awful script for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot to convince Stallone he needed the role to establish the upper hand, tricking him into one of the worst movies of his entire career.
The tensions eventually thawed, and the veterans became close friends, but the rivalry still remains, even if neither of them is as quick to acknowledge it these days. After all, not too long after Schwarzenegger got the Netflix docuseries treatment in Arnold, Stallone got one of his own in Sly, which may or may not be a coincidence driven by the decades-long game of one-upmanship.
During that period of healing, when they put their differences to one side, Stallone even extended an olive branch in the form of a boating trip. Schwarzenegger has never been too keen on the sea, possibly because it doesn’t make enough noise seeing as he owns his own tank and uses it to pancake cars during his spare time, but if he wanted to hit the ocean he’d only do it under his own terms.
“Sly calls me, ‘Want to come on the yacht?’. What, do you think I’m going to ask, ‘When can I have dinner?’. It’s not going to happen,” the Terminator frontman relayed to People. “I can get my own yacht. That’s not my trip. I can’t even relax under those circumstances.”
It’s fair enough that Schwarzenegger wasn’t sold on the prospect of hitting the open water, but he couldn’t resist getting another dig in at his own rival. If he’s ever going to embark on an aquatic adventure, then the only way he’s going to do it is if everyone – especially Stallone – does it on his terms.
