A not very fun thing happened for director Edgar Wright and star Glen Powell last weekend. The Running Man, despite a lot of hype, fell flat at the box office, grossing a measly $17 million domestically and another $11 million internationally. While everyone involved took great pains to separate the film from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie it’s technically a remake of (although it’s more of another adaptation of the book), it’s yet another example of big-budget remakes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone movies falling flat at the box office. You’d think Hollywood would have learned when Total Recall and Conan the Barbarian landed with a thud many years ago, but it seems like this is a painful lesson the town just needs to learn over and over again. While Arnold Schwarzenegger is being spared any new remakes—for a while, anyway—his classic action cohort Sylvester Stallone isn’t so lucky.
Glen Powell is cool but he isn’t ARNOLD
Indeed, there are two big-budget, Stallone-less continuations of franchises he built coming out next year. One is the gender-flipped Cliffhanger remake with Lily James, and the other is a Rambo prequel directed by Sisu’s Jalmari Helander and starring Noah Centineo. While the Cliffhanger remake sounds like a worse idea on paper than the Rambo prequel, I actually think the latter is the one that could really be a disaster. For one thing, Stallone is still passionate about the character and has been trying to do his own prequel for years. It feels like disrespect not to involve him. He brilliantly passed the torch to Michael B. Jordan in the Creed movies, and in that respect they did everything right, as Jordan isn’t playing Rocky—he’s Adonis Creed, his own character. Centineo will be playing John Rambo.
What’s arguably an even bigger pitfall is that the movie will be set during the Vietnam War. Now, Helander has worked in a historical setting before, but if you watch either Sisu movie, both are black-and-white “good guys versus bad guys” stories. You love watching Jorma Tommila’s Aatami blow away Nazis in the first and Red Army Soviets in the killer sequel. A movie set during the Vietnam War—whose legacy many are still trying to reckon with—seems more complex. It will have to be handled a lot differently than any of Helander’s other movies.
Can this man realistically play Rambo?
People call the Rambo movies a product of their time, but if you go back and revisit them, especially the first one, they are more nuanced than you remember. Stallone is a strong creative force, and a new take on Rambo’s time in the Vietnam War sounds like something he’d have the right perspective on. For Helander, my fear is that this young Rambo movie will just be a fun shoot-’em-up (he’s already promised it will be less dark than the last few Rambo flicks), where in First Blood, we see a man in John Rambo who’s been broken by the terror of his service in Nam. A Young Rambo movie shouldn’t be “fun.”
Of course, who knows? Helander could absolutely nail it—and Centineo is a fine choice to play a younger version of a character originally played by Stallone. But the fact remains: outside of the Creed series, which did it right, none of these new versions of Arnold and Sly classics have worked.
Should Hollywood bother with 80s classic remakes? Let us know in the talkbacks.
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