Sylvester Stallone has had an incredible career that has created some of the most iconic characters in film history. However, the actor hasn’t always been a box office smash, a fact that he admits became difficult for him to deal with during the lowest point in his career.
While Stallone has had some incredible box office successes, it’s rare for anybody with as many projects as he has had to not have a few flops, too. However, for Stallone, many of those flops came all in a row. Speaking with CBS Mornings, Stallone says it got so bad that his kids didn’t realize what he did for a living because they had never seen his work. He explained:
It was more than a drought. It was about eight years of spiderwebs on the phone… I was crumbling, my self-righteousness was crumbling, and I realized my daughters had no idea what I did for a living. They’d never seen me act.
It’s not difficult to see the period of time that Sylvester Stallone is talking about. Following the underperformance of Rocky V, which put the actor’s major franchise on ice, he tried to do new things. He attempted comedy, including the infamous Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, a movie Arnold Schwarznegeer claims he tricked Stallone into doing.
He made a couple of solid films in Cliffhanger and Demolition Man, after going back to action, but after that, it gets really rough. Judge Dredd was a bomb that fans hated. Most people have forgotten his action entries of the time, like The Specialist and Assassins. I’ll defend Cop Land as a great Stallone performance, but it certainly didn’t make much of a cultural impact.
Stallone says after his string of bombs, he wanted to try to do something big so that he and Rocky didn’t go out on the bottom. He wanted to make the film that would become 2006’s Rocky Balboa. Unfortunately, it seems he was considered box office poison by this point, as the response he got from the studio wasn’t inspiring. He said:
The studio said, quote, ‘Over our dead body. You’re done, Rocky is done.’… That was going to be my last film, because I just didn’t want to go out a total loser, especially on Rocky, and it came out pretty well. And then I go, ‘I think you got one more in ya,’ and then do Rambo. And then, ‘Maybe one more,’ and then you do Expendables.
In the end, as Stallone says, it came out pretty well. Rocky Balboa impressed at the box office 16 years after the previous film had struggled. From there, he was able to revisit the Rambo franchise as well and launch a new one with The Expendables.
Sylvester Stallone’s legacy as a filmmaker is assured, and on balance, he certainly had more success than failure. While he’s officially parted ways with Rocky Balboa, and the Rambo prequel starring Noah Centineo will go on without him, he certainly proved the studio wrong once before. Perhaps he will again before he’s done.