Sylvester Stallone Hated One of His Own Movies So Much He Tried to Burn It

Sylvester Stallone’s career is built on two characters, Rocky Balboa and John Rambo. Both came from projects the industry did not initially believe in, and both nearly slipped away from him. His memoir, ‘The Steps,’ looks back at that journey, and he has been telling the stories behind it in his promotional interviews.

The Rocky story is well known. Stallone has said that the money offered for the screenplay kept going up without him attached, and that he held out because he knew he would never find something like it again and could not make it in Hollywood without it. The Rambo story is stranger, and it involves a movie he reportedly wanted to destroy.

‘First Blood,’ released on Oct. 22, 1982, was directed by Ted Kotcheff and based on David Morrell’s 1972 novel. Stallone starred and co-wrote the screenplay, playing Vietnam War veteran John Rambo, who is hunted by a small-town sheriff and his police force after being mistreated in custody. It had been in development for years, with a long list of actors, including Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood and Robert De Niro, attached at different points before dropping out.

Now Stallone has revisited the film’s rocky start on ‘The Graham Norton Show.’ The 80-year-old appeared on the BBC One program on Friday, Oct. 2, alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones, Andrew Garfield and the band Blossoms. He said his agent threw up when they first saw the edit, adding, “It was so bad I tried to buy it back so I could torch it.”

The first cut ran well over three hours. Stallone said he trimmed it down to 89 minutes and that “what I cut out was mostly me.” The released version runs 93 minutes, and the heavy re-edit is widely credited with saving the film.

It is a story he has told before. On ‘The Howard Stern Show’ in 2005, he said he and his manager tried to buy the film back and burn the negative, and that he thought it was a career killer. His fix was drastic. He cut his own dialogue and let other characters describe Rambo, a method he compared to a Greek chorus.

The result was a hit. ‘First Blood’ grossed $125.2 million on a budget of about $15 million. It topped the North American box office for three weeks in a row, and its opening weekend was the best October opening at the time. Initial reviews were mixed, but critics have since reappraised it as an influential action film.

The gamble paid off for the franchise too. The 1985 sequel, ‘Rambo: First Blood Part II,’ grossed an estimated $300.4 million worldwide and became a pop culture phenomenon. Few people could have predicted that when the actor was throwing up in an alley over the first cut.

Stallone’s other stories from the conversation show how close he came to missing out. He said he was around the eleventh actor when the role was offered, because nobody wanted it. He also reflected on his old rivalry with Arnold Schwarzenegger, saying they are good friends today but that the competition began the moment he saw him.

For a star who has spent four decades as an action icon, the lesson is a surprising one. Sometimes the best thing an actor can do to rescue a film is get out of its way, and cut most of himself out of the picture.