We don’t usually think of Sylvester Stallone as a comedic powerhouse, outside of situations in which his opponents must stop, lest his mother open fire. But the “Hollywood Ambassador” did float an idea in interviews this week that we would absolutely like to see executed, even if not for exactly the same reasons that Stallone does: A Rambo prequel starring Sly himself, with AI used to de-age him back to a spritely 18.
Stallone was asked about this possibility while doing the press rounds for the latest season of his Paramount+ series Tulsa King, where he claimed that “AI is sophisticated enough to go through Saigon to see [Rambo] at 18 years old and basically use the same image. So it isn’t as big a stretch.” (He also notes, possibly more accurately, that “Everyone thought I was crazy” when he broached this idea.)
Now, admittedly, Stallone’s early works have entered the phase where Hollywood is looking to mine them aggressively for nostalgia purposes: A couple of weeks ago, Noah Centineo was reportedly attached to play a Young Rambo in a film adaptation, and there’s a making-of-Rocky movie in the works from Peter Farrelly. (Stallone expressed some bafflement at that one, since he wasn’t consulted about the project, which will star Antonio Ippolino as a young Stallone: “I was shocked to read [about] it,” he said in a podcast interview with The Playlist. “I have zero to do with it.”)
All that being said, the idea of a computer-assisted Stallone playing John Rambo at 18 is so incredibly fraught that our brains can’t stop poking at it, in much the manner of a sore tooth. Let’s leap past the basic point that, Stallone’s confidence aside, Hollywood de-aging is still pretty suspect, even when used to knock 30 years off a well-known actor—let alone the 60 you’d need to do here. There’s also the simple comparison that happens when you look at Stallone’s body in 2025 versus his own back in 1982, when he filmed First Blood. (The first, and now most off-model, of the Rambo films.) Part of what makes that movie work is that for the first part of its runtime, John Rambo presents as a wiry, but fairly normal-looking guy, who just happens to be extremely good at killing people once the very dumb local cops start jumping up and down on his trauma buttons. First Blood is already an outlier in the franchise it spawned—something that would only get weirder if it was sitting on the timeline right next to a prequel about an 18-year-old digital beefcake formed from 250 pounds of computer meat singlehandedly killing his way through Vietnam.
Still, Stallone says, there’s simply no other alternative when tackling the younger days of an iconic character. After all, didn’t audiences teach him that with his 2000 remake of Get Carter? (Leaving aside that critics drubbed Stephen Kay’s movie more for its general lifelessness than because Stallone couldn’t compare to a 1970s Michael Caine.) “It’s very, very hard,” Stallone said of Centineo stepping into his shoes. ” He may do a stellar job, but you’re overcoming this because I went through it with Get Carter. Everyone loves the original, and then you’re always fighting that prejudice.” Better to simply bring on the computer beef, instead.
[via Variety]
