On this episode, we take a look back at the history of the First Blood movies.
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From its beginnings as an idea by Penn State English student David Morrell in 1968 to its publication as a novel in 1972, First Blood would spend nearly a decade in development in hell, attracting filmmakers like Richard Brooks (The Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry, In Cold Blood), John Frankenheimer (The Birdman of Alcatraz, Black Sunday, The Manchurian Candidate), Sydney Pollack (They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Three Days of the Condor, The Way We Were), and Martin Ritt (Hud, The Long Hot Summer), before it would finally go into production in Canada in 1981.
The films discussed in this episode, in order of release:
First Blood (1982, Ted Kotcheff)
Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985, George P. Cosmatos)
Rambo III (1988, Peter MacDonald)
Rambo (2008, Sylvester Stallone)
Rambo: Last Blood (2019, Adrian Grünberg)
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On this episode, we’re going to start celebrating the summer movie season with a film franchise that, for some time in the 1980s, seemed to epitomize the summer movie season.
The First Blood series. Better known as Rambo.
But, as always, before we can get to the movies, we need to get to the movies.
Rambo was born from the imagination of Canadian-American novelist David Morrell.
After graduating from St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Canada with a BA in English in 1966, Morrell would begin studying at Penn State, where he would earn his M.A. and Ph.D. in American literature. While studying at Penn State in 1968, he would begin working on his first novel, inspired in part by discussions he would have with a fellow student who had recently returned from fighting in Vietnam. Over the course of three years, even after graduation from Penn State and becoming a teacher at the University of Iowa, Morrell continued to work on the book. It told the story of a homeless Vietnam veteran only known as Rambo, who finds himself in trouble with the local police chief when he wanders into a small town in Kentucky. The sheriff, Wilfred Teasle, first drives Rambo to the other edge of town and orders the man to not come back into town. When Rambo does return, Teasle arrests Rambo and tosses them into the local jail on charges of vagrancy and resisting arrest. Rambo, who suffers from what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder, has a flashback to his time in the war due to the cramped cell inducing his claustrophobia. Rambo escapes from the jail when the police try to cut his hair and clean him up. He steals a motorcycle and heads into the nearby mountains to hide.
Eventually, Teasle learns about Rambo’s history and skills thanks to Colonel Sam Trautman, a Green Beret leader who worked with Rambo in Vietnam, and has arrived in the small town to try and help Teasle get himself and Rambo out of this situation with their lives and dignity intact.
But neither man, Rambo or Teasle, is willing to do so, and the story ends with the deaths of both men.
The character of Rambo was inspired by Audie Murphy, a World War II hero who became a movie star in the years after the war, but suffered from undiagnosed PTSD because of his memories of the war and his movie roles which often forced him to relive situations similar to what happened to him in Italy and France during the war. Murphy could not sleep without a loaded pistol under his pillow, and would become addicted to sleeping pills in order to get any kind of rest.
Publisher Rowman and Littlefield released the book in the spring of 1972, and while it wasn’t a big seller, Hollywood would take notice of it, as would a 25 year old creative arts teacher at the University of Maine, who used the book as a teaching tool to his own students as an example of excellent writing. That teacher? Stephen King.
Hollywood actually took notice of the book before it was even published. Columbia Pictures, looking to ride the current wave of anti-hero films like Bonnie and Clyde and its own Easy Rider, would purchase the option to make the book into a movie for $75k, and assigned writer/director Richard Brooks, whose twenty-year film career included such classics as Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry and In Cold Blood, to begin adapting the book into a workable screenplay.
Brooks would keep the major storyline intact but make three major changes. He would make Teasle not a veteran of the Korean War, as he is in the book, but of World War II, he would change Colonel Trautman into a psychiatrist, and he would change the ending. Rambo still dies at the end, but the how would change.
Brooks envisioned Burt Lancaster or Lee Marvin as Teasle, and Bette Davis of all people to play the psychiatrist. But the project would be put into turnaround before Brooks could even finish his first draft of the script, in part because he refused to change the ending to let Rambo live. Columbia would sell the screen right to Warner Brothers in 1973 for $125k, and Warners president John Calley saw their number one star, Clint Eastwood, as Rambo, or maybe Robert De Niro if Clint wasn’t interested. By August 1973, director Martin Ritt, whose movies included such classics as The Long Hot Summer and Hud, was assigned as director, and Ritt would try to get Steve McQueen as Rambo and Burt Lancaster as the sheriff. But by 1975, Ritt was off the project, and Sydney Pollack, whose directing career by this point included such films as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, The Way We Were and Three Days of the Condor, would become the next filmmaker to tackle the project. Celebrated Broadway playwright David Rabe would be hired to write a new script, and Rabe would make two major changes to the story: he would, like Brooks years earlier, completely remove Colonel Trautman from the story, and he would have Teasle be the one who ends up killing Rambo. Pollock and producer Martin Bregman had hoped to get Al Pacino to play Rambo, but he would decline the role after reading Rabe’s script, finding it to be more extreme than he would prefer. Pollock and Pacino would leave the project together to make the car racing drama Bobby Deerfield at Warners instead, and it would be some time before they could attract another director. The Saturday Night Fever duo of director John Badham and star John Travolta flirted with the project for a short time, with George C. Scott being considered for Trautman, and Gene Hackman and Charles Durning being considered for Teasle, but Badham would commit to a new, sexy version of Dracula at Universal instead, and Travolta would make Moment by Moment with Lily Tomlin once his commitment to Grease was completed.
But the one important thing that would come out of this period is a new screenplay written by William Sackheim and Michael Kozell which would end up becoming the blueprint for the film that would finally get made. And it would be based on this screenplay that neophyte producer Carter DeHaven would be able to secure a one-year option from Warner Brothers to try and get the film made independently. DeHaven would get a new production company called Cinema Group to commit $10m to make the movie, with John Frankenheimer, whose credits included The Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, and Black Sunday, attached as director. Brad Davis, the star of Midnight Express, was signed to play Rambo, and George C. Scott would finally be cast as Trautman.
Before the project could move forward, though, Frankenheimer wanted one small change to the script. He wanted Rambo to live, and Michael Kozell would tweak the script to make this happen. After nearly eight years, it looked like First Blood would finally become a movie.
But just a few weeks before that film was supposed to start shooting, Filmways, the distributor who was helping to fund the film, went bankrupt, and all parties involved were released from their contracts.
Enter Carolco Pictures and the team of Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar, two small-time film promoters who were looking to move into the Hollywood spotlight. They had been keeping track of the First Blood project, which they thought would be great as the first movie Carolco would produce, instead of just buying and selling from around the world. Carolco would spend $375k to buy the movie rights to the book from Warner Brothers, and another $150k to Cinema Group for the Sackheim/Kozell screenplay, and then a couple million more to lock up Sylvester Stallone to both star as Rambo and rewrite the script. Stallone would make Rambo more of a hero type instead of a stone cold psycho killer, but he was torn over whether or not Rambo should survive at the end. Stallone would do seven revisions of the Sackheim/Kozell script between July 1981 and November 1981, where sometimes Rambo would live and sometimes Rambo would die.
Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, who was better known as the director of comedies like Fun With Dick and Jane, Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? and North Dallas Forty, would be hired as director, and filming on the $12m budgeted movie was scheduled to begin in the woods of British Columbia in November 1981. Brian Dennehy would play the local sheriff, Teasle, and the legendary Kirk Douglas would be Trautman. But shortly after filming began, Douglas would have second thoughts about the script and would leave the film. Richard Crenna would be on set to play Trautman only a week after Douglas left. The production schedule would be moved around to not lose any time.
That would not be the only major problem with the production.
Kotcheff had wanted the location to have a greying, overcast look, but for the first month of production, it would be unseasonably warm and sunny. You know how they say “be careful what you wish for, for you will surely get it?” Kotcheff would get exactly what he want, and more. In early January 1982, the production would need to shut down for a week when an extremely strong winter storm would pummel the area with heavy snow. There would be several more times when the production would lose time to heavy snowstorms, losing about two months total to these shut downs, adding nearly $3m to the cost of making the film.
And during one of these shutdowns, someone would break into the storage area where many of the guns were being stored and steal about $50k worth of machine guns that had been altered to only shoot blanks. The local superintendent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was worried that, according to the prop master, the guns would be easily reconverted back into fully functional assault weapons.
While the film was shooting in Canada, Vajna and Kassar were busy in an editing suite with Joan Chapman, who would be making her feature debut as an editor on the film, putting together an eighteen-minute promotional reel, in order to find an American distributor for the film, with 20th Century-Fox and Warner Brothers as their top two preferences. But Fox wouldn’t bite, nor would Warners, who had spent seven years trying to get the film made, or any other major Hollywood distributor.
They would then have Chapman put together a fifty-five-minute reel for the film in time for the March 1982 American Film Market, one of eleven movies they would be representing. Teased by a two-page ad in Variety and The Hollywood Report featuring a drawing of Stallone wearing what would soon be Rambo’s signature bandana, and a tagline that promised “a machine… programmed to kill… impossible to stop,” a number of foreign distributors would sign up to purchase rights for most of the global territories, but they still couldn’t get an American distributor to bite. Warners and Paramount were considering the film, but in the end, Vajna and Kassar would make a deal with Orion Pictures, the independent distributor founded by several former heads of United Artists Pictures in 1979, who had just gotten out of their distribution deal with Warner Brothers by purchasing the distribution apparatus of Filmways, the company who was supposed to help finance and distribute the Frankenheimer version of the movie before they went bankrupt in early 1981.
Orion would set an October 22nd, 1982, release date for the film, and would start to promote it with teaser trailers and posters in theatres four months in advance, getting early exposure with trailer placements in front of films like Blade Runner, Conan the Barbarian, Firefox, Megaforce, The Road Warrior, The Thing, and Stallone’s own Rocky III.
Before the film could get released, though, they needed to figure out the ending. Kotcheff shot two endings to the film, one where Rambo dies in the end, and one where Rambo lives. Test audiences watching the film clearly preferred the latter ending, so that would be the one they would go with.
By the time October 22nd rolled around, action film fans were starving for something new. Most of the big movies for the previous two months were movies like E.T., My Favorite Year, and An Officer and a Gentleman, good movies in their own ways but very much not action movies.
First Blood would smash everyone’s expectations for the film, opening in the first place that weekend with a $6.6m gross from 901 theatres. The film would stay in first place for its first three weeks of release, and after six weeks, it would still be in the top five with more than $40m in ticket sales.
But when the Christmas movies started to open, with movies like Tootsie starting to take over the water cooler conversations, First Blood would start to quickly lose theatres and would be out of most first-run theatres after the first of the year, with more than $47m in tickets sold.
The success in America would help drive the success of the film around the world. First Blood would set box office records in more than a dozen countries in Europe and Asia, and would gross another $50m in the rest of the world.
Which, naturally, would lead to the desire to make more Rambo movies.
Less than a year after having trouble finding an American distributor for First Blood at the 1982 American Film Market, Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar returned to the 1983 American Film Market with nothing more than a teaser poster for First Blood 2 and a promise to have the final film ready for a Christmas 1984 release. They didn’t have a story. They didn’t have a director. And they were still secretly negotiating with Stallone to return.
Global film buyers didn’t care about any of that, with dozens of global distributors committing more than $25m in purchase deals. Vajna and Kassar were only expecting to budget the new film at $20m, which means they were already $5m into profiting off the new film before they even had a story or an American distributor. Not a bad place to be.
But with success also comes the lawsuits.
Warner Brothers, Cinema Group, and David Morrell teamed together to file suit against Carolco, Vajna, and Kassar, and their third party company Anabasis Investments, claiming they had not been properly paid regarding their profit points over First Blood, concerned about Carolco’s “faulty” accounting.
While they dealt with the lawsuit, Vajna and Kassar started to get the First Blood II machine going. They would start negotiating with John Travolta, who had just finished shooting the Saturday Night Fever sequel Staying Alive that Stallone directed, to be Rambo’s partner in the still undefined story, but Stallone would nix that idea.
Kevin Jarre, a struggling screenwriter in 1983 who would later go on to write the scripts for Glory, Navy SEALS, Tombstone and The Mummy, would get an unlikely call from Carolco to come in and pitch an idea for First Blood II to Stallone. Jarre’s pitch was simple: maybe he searches for missing POWs back in Vietnam.
Stallone’s response? “Great! Let’s do it!”
Jarre’s story would find the now-named John Rambo being recruited by Colonel Trautman to return to the very same POW camp he was once held prisoner at, to take pictures of the camp and confirm there are still American soldiers being held there, nearly a decade after the end of the conflict. For this, Rambo will earn a full Presidential pardon for what happened three years earlier. Rambo fulfills his part of the deal, but he goes off script when he finds an opportunity to break one of the prisoners out of the camp. Just as Rambo and the POW reach the chopper that will take them back to safety, they are betrayed by the official in charge of the operation. They are captured by the Vietnam soldiers and returned to the POW camp, where Rambo is tortured by the Soviet soldiers running the camp with the Vietnamese. With the help of a young anti-communist rebel, Rambo is able to escape the POW camp, where he goes on a one-man rampage against the Vietnamese and Soviet soldiers and rescues the POWs.
While Stallone liked Jarre’s storyline, he didn’t feel the neophyte writer was ready to tackle the screenplay. David Giler, the producer of Alien who had done an uncredited polish on the First Blood screenplay, suggested another newer writer for Stallone to work with. Someone who had just finished directing his first feature film, and was going to be writing and directing another movie for Giler in the near future.
James Cameron.
It would still be six months before Orion Pictures released The Terminator, and it’d be another year before he would be in England shooting Aliens, so he would use the downtime to punch Kevin Jarre’s story into a full screenplay. Cameron’s first draft, which was called First Blood: The Mission, would be completed in two months. Stallone was impressed with the script and the writer, but there were going to need to be some changes to make it a Stallone-approved script. So even though Stallone had been busy writing the screenplay for Rocky IV, he would set that aside for a short time and get to work writing a new draft of First Blood II. Gone would be the tech-savvy sidekick Cameron had given Rambo, while there would be more political ramifications between the clearly conservative Trautman and the more neutral Rambo, or, at least, what Stallone considered to be a kind of neutrality. He’d also amp up the action, since Cameron’s script took nearly forty pages to get to the first major action set piece, and wrote Rambo’s famous speech at the end of the film, based on sentiments conveyed to him after the opening of First Blood.
First Blood director Ted Kotcheff, depending on who you ask, either declined to come back to direct the film or was not asked to come back. Either way, Stallone knew who he wanted.
George P. Cosmatos was a Greek-Italian filmmaker who had made a few somewhat popular movies in Europe like The Cassandra Crossing and Escape to Athena, and had recently made his Hollywood studio debut with the Peter Weller-starring horror film Of Unknown Origin. While the film was not much of a hit in America, Stallone was impressed enough with Cosmatos’s style to ask him to direct the film.
Filming on the $25m movie was scheduled to begin in Thailand in June 1984, and Stallone would spend the first six months of the year getting himself into the best shape of his life, which would also change the direction of his acting career for the next two decades. But, depending on who you spoke to, the film would end up shooting in Mexico instead either because Stallone couldn’t coexist with the insect-laden Asian terrain, or because it was going to be cheaper to shoot a lot closer to home. Either way, the very first thing they would shoot when production began was a short teaser trailer that could be attached to Rhinestone, Stallone’s music comedy with Dolly Parton that would open in theatres in just two weeks. An oiled-up Stallone is seen getting ready for battle, wrapping his chest and arms with straps of ammo, before the camera zooms in on Stallone’s face. “Rambo is back,” intoned the narrator, “in Rambo: First Blood, Part II.”
I'm not sure if putting a trailer for what obviously was going to be an R-rated action film in front of a family-friendly PG comedy film was the best idea, but the few Stallone fans who would show up were jazzed to see Rambo was coming back, even if it wouldn’t be for another eleven months.
Principal photography would last for two months, but a skeleton second unit crew would remain in Mexico for another four months, setting up and executing special stunt sequences that would not require the presence of the star. Sadly, one of these stunts, featuring a fireball explosion on top of a waterfall, would end up killing one of the special effects artists, when he slipped on a rock and fell down the waterfall. The film would be dedicated to Cliff Wegner, Jr.
Despite First Blood being one of their most successful movies to date, Orion would pass on releasing Rambo, so Carolco would open bidding on the film to every studio in town. Columbia Pictures’ new sister outfit, TriStar Pictures, would win the rights to release the film and would set a May 22nd, 1985 release date. Along with the Richard Pryor comedy Brewster’s Millions, and the latest James Bond movie, A View to a Kill, they would be the films that started the 1985 summer movie season.
A View to a Kill would open in 1583 theatres, and gross $13.3 in its first weekend, the best opening ever for a Bond film.
Brewster’s Millions would gross $9.85m from 1521 theatres.
Rambo would gross $25.5m from 2074 theatres.
That 2074 theatres would set a new exhibition record for the widest opening release, the previous record being Beverly Hills Cop’s 2010 a year and a half earlier.
And that $25.5m opening weekend gross would be the third highest in movie history, after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’s $33.9m in 1984 and Return of the Jedi’s $30.5m in 1983.
TriStar knew they would have a hit on their hands. A joint venture between Columbia Pictures, the CBS television network, and the HBO cable channel, TriStar would time the release of their first IPO to the opening of Rambo and would sell 2.5m shares of stock on the first day. It might have been only 11.8% of the company, but it would be the first time in years that the general public could purchase shares in a movie company.
Over the course of the summer, many of the movies released would not succeed with audiences. Joe Dante’s wonderful sci-fi comedy Explorers, his follow-up to Gremlins, would cost $25m to make and only gross $9m. Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, a $25m adaptation of the cult sci-fi novel Space Vampires, would only sell $11m in tickets. The sexy John Travolta/Jamie Lee Curtis drama Perfect would barely gross half its $25m budget, but that would be better than Disney’s $28m Return to Oz, which could only muster $11m in ticket sales.
Three similarly-themed science movies, Weird Science, Real Genius, and My Science Project would open within seven days of each other, and all three would bomb. Disney’s animated division, which could usually be counted on for a hit film, would miss hard on their very expensive dark fantasy film The Black Cauldron. Two westerns, Silverado and Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider would quickly be sent packing. The biggest films of the summer would, like 1984, two Steven Spielberg productions, The Goonies and Back to the Future. Rambo would be not only the second most successful film of the summer, with $150m in tickets sold, but after Back to the Future’s $210m, but it would also be the second highest grossing film of the entire year, even beating Rocky IV. Rambo would also earn another $150m from the rest of the world.
Naturally, development on First Blood III would begin immediately, while Stallone fulfilled his two-picture deal with Cannon Films. The first of those films, Cobra, would be directed by George P. Cosmatos.
Carolco wanted a bigger scope for First Blood III and would hire Harry Kleiner, whose credits over the previous thirty years included Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, Fantastic Voyage, and the screen adaptation of Oscar Hammerstein’s stage musical Carmen Jones, to take the first pass. But Stallone didn’t like that draft, for reasons never disclosed.
Through contacts at Cannon, Stallone would get to know Sheldon Lettich, who had just turned in a script to Golan Globus called Bloodsport that was going to be the first major starring role for Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Stallone would have Lettich take a pass at First Blood III. Lettich would come up with a story that would send John Rambo, who at the end of First Blood II decided to move to Thailand after his Presidential pardon, where he fights in underground stick fighting competitions in order to help restore a monastery, to Afghanistan, to help rescue Colonel Trautman, after Rambo opts out of trying to help the Afghan Mujahideen repel the Soviet Army.
Now, in 2022, we have the hindsight of knowing the Mujahideen of 1987 would eventually morph into the Taliban of the 1990s and 2000s, but such is the problem of trying to tie a movie into current events.
Sylvester Stallone, who had defeated the Soviets not only in First Blood II but also in Rocky IV, loved the idea of going after Mother Russia once again, although it was his wish to see Rambo move away from being less of a cartoon character and more of a realistic figure, an ironic statement since there had been a 65 episode animated Rambo series in 1985 and 1986, which had action figure and coloring book tie-ins.
But to ensure the action on screen was as big as possible, Stallone would ask Vajna and Kassar to hire Russell Mulcahy, the music video director responsible for several of Duran Duran’s most lavish videos and who had recently directed the worldwide hit film Highlander.
The budget for First Blood III, which would soon be renamed Rambo III, would be $45m, triple the budget of the first film and nearly double the budget of the sequel, in large part because Stallone would be paid $16m this time around as star and screenwriter. The film would begin production in Israel in late August 1987 but would hit a snag two weeks into production, when Stallone and Mulcahy would start butting heads on practically everything having to do with how the film was being made. Vajna and Kassar, whose company had practically been made on the back of Sylvester Stallone, would back their star. Mulcahy and cinematographer Ric Waite would leave the production, and the producers and star would spend several days going over a list of potential replacement directors, before settling on Peter MacDonald, a camera operator and second unit director whose credits included A Bridge Too Far, the first two Superman movies, Labyrinth, and First Blood II, and was already working the second unit on this movie. It would be MacDonald’s first effort as a director.
Once MacDonald was on board, filming would start back up, and move from Israel to Thailand, where MacDonald would himself shoot the entirely of the stick fighting sequence with a handheld camera, to Yuma AZ, before finishing principal photography at the end of January 1988.
MacDonald would have only four months to finish the film’s post-production, as the movie was locked in for a May 25th release. The film was expected to be so big, that Carolco and TriStar Pictures had opened up bidding for the film while they were still shooting. One chain, United Artists Theatres, was so gung-ho on locking the film up for their best locations in Los Angeles, New York City, and other major cities, they would bid 110% of their ticket sales for some of their best performing theatres like the Coronet Theatre in Westwood and the Criterion in New York City’s Times Square, meaning if Rambo III had sold, say, $63k in tickets in its first weekend at the Coronet, they’d actually have to pay $69.3k in rental fees to play it. Now, most theatres in major cities like Los Angeles and New York City would bid in the 80-90% rentals range, because theatres make most of their money on popcorn, candy, and soda sales. But bidding 110% means you’re going to have to give away part of your concession sales too. The movie would not only need to be a big hit, but moviegoers would really need to spend big at the snack bar as well.
Now, remember a few moments ago, when I said the budget for Rambo III was $45m? When the movie started production, it was $45m, but with the production delays due to the firing of Mulcahy and several members of his production team, and the extended production schedule and additional footage needing to be shot by Peter MacDonald, the final budget would end up being $58m, which would make Rambo III the most expensive movie ever made to that point, unadjusted for inflation. It had been ten years since Richard Donner’s $55m Superman movie had overtaken the previous record holder, 1963’s Cleopatra. Rambo would hold the dubious record of the most expensive movie released to theatres for a grand total of twenty-eight days when the $58.16m Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released.
Along with Crocodile Dundee II, Rambo III’s opening on May 25th would signify the official start of the summer movie season. But Rambo III would not be the number one movie in the nation on its opening weekend, unlike its two predecessors. Its $16.75m opening would only be good enough for second place, nearly $8m less than Dundee.
In its second week, Rambo III would lose 54% of its audience and come in third behind both Dundee and the Tom Hanks movie Big. In its third week, it would fall all the way to sixth place, barely earning more than half what Rambo II did in the same timeframe three years earlier.
TriStar and Carolco went into damage control, giving an interview with Variety’s Richard Gold assuring readers that not only was Rambo III not going to be a bomb once it opened internationally, but that there would, and I quote, “absolutely” be a Rambo IV. The headline for the article read “TriStar, Carolco Execs Insist Rambo III Won’t Die at Box Office,” but the header for the continuation of the article deeper into the issue was a far more accurate statement. It simply read “Rambo III in Box Office Retreat.”
To be fair, Carolco and TriStar weren’t exactly wrong on either major statement.
Rambo III’s international success would save the film. It would gross more than $135m overseas, which helped to offset the $53.7m domestic gross and put the film into a small but still profitable margin. But whether it was a general indifference to mirroring real-life happenings half a world away, or the film being named the most violent movie ever made by the Guinness World Records, there was definitely a cooling of enthusiasm for another Rambo movie.
And there would be another Rambo movie, but it would be another twenty years before it was made.
Neither Carolco, which went bankrupt in 1995 after a series of expensive flops like Showgirls and Cutthroat Island couldn’t overcome the successes of Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, and Cliffhanger, nor TriStar Pictures, which in the late 90s would become a more genre-centric label for anime, action and horror films with the occasional prestige picture, would be involved in the production or distribution.
That fourth movie, simply titled Rambo, would take Rambo III’s world record as the most violent movie ever made, and like Rambo III, it would not open to first place at the American box office, coming in second to the lame Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer parody film Meet the Spartans. And like Rambo III, it would not be as successful as its predecessors, grossing only $113m in total around the world, with just $42m of that coming from America.
It would be followed eleven years later by what is currently the final Rambo movie, 2019’s Rambo: Last Blood. This time, Rambo went up against the Mexican drug cartels. At one point, Stallone would work with David Morrell, the creator of the Rambo character, to come up with a different storyline for the fifth movie, which would have been the first time Morrell would have been directly involved with the writing of one of the movies based on his most famous creation, but the company who owned the rights to the character rejected the script they wrote together.
It would be released into theatres in September 2019, and like Rambo III and Rambo, it grossed far less than the previous film, earning just $91.5m worldwide against an $80m production and advertising budget. And, once again, it would be heavily criticized for its ultra-violent imagery. David Morrell would be especially harsh on the film, calling it soulless and cheap, saying he felt like less of a human being for having seen it.
But apparently, Stallone didn’t get the memo that fewer and fewer people we seeing every subsequent film since 1985. While promoting the film, he would, despite the title of the movie being Last Blood, express an interest in Rambo taking refuge at an Indian reservation after his final battle with the cartels, while also stating that he was considering a plan for a series of prequels, exploring John Rambo as a teenager before he headed off to Vietnam.
If you’ll notice, I haven’t given any critical evaluation to any of the movies, and there’s a specific reason for that. I’ve never seen any of the Rambo movies outside of the original 1982 First Blood film, which I thought was a very well-made movie with a pretty good performance from Stallone, probably his second best after the original Rocky. But I’ve never been interested in most of the movies he’s made. I’ve only seen about fifteen or so of the movies he’s ever appeared in, and two of those are superhero movies, one where he only appears at the very end and the other where he’s in a good portion of the movie but only providing the voice of a CG animated character. And that, my friends, was a brief history of the First Blood movies.
Thank you for joining us.
Please note that our next episode, Episode 78, will be released in three weeks, on June 12th, as I will be taking a short vacation with my wife next week to New York City, and I do not plan on working during my vacation.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, FilmJerk.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered in this episode.
The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated, and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.