Sylvester Stallone is currently on a press tour to promote his new Paramount+ series Tulsa King, but he’s clearly got another project on his mind. That project is, improbably, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, a misbegotten buddy cop comedy about a man (Stallone) and his mother (Golden Girls’ Estelle Getty) solving a murder together. Stallone’s involvement in the 1992 film (which sits at a rough 14% on Rotten Tomatoes) is infamously the result of a prank by his rival Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fact Stallone himself will be quick to remind you.
“We couldn’t stand to be in the same galaxy together for a while. We truly, truly loathed each other,” he said in an appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show (via Entertainment Weekly). Regarding Stop!, he explained, “He’s quite clever. He goes around town saying, ‘I can’t wait to do this film.’ I go to my agent, ‘Get that thing away from him. Get people options on me.’ I got it and I said, ‘What a piece of s—- this is.’ He goes, ‘Ha ha ha!’ At least I wasn’t pregnant in a film, Arnold. We’re even.”
“Schwarzenegger tricked me to do that piece of junk. That’s one of those things that you go, ‘Why am I in this?’ There’s a scene they say, ‘Would you mind wearing diapers?’ I’m going to kill Arnold. I am going to find him and track him,” he also said on Fox & Friends, saying he believed Schwarzenegger “desperately” wanted to do Stop! “And I go, ‘Well, I’m not going to let that happen.’ So, I snatch it. I said, ‘I want this film desperately.’ And once I got it, I realized, ‘I’m in such a turkey and it’s not even Thanksgiving—it’s not even Thanksgiving, folks.’”
To be clear, Stallone has been railing against this injustice for years now, but it’s obviously not enough to go on the record about it just once. He mentioned it again in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “Also, I had heard Schwarzenegger was going to do that movie and I said, ‘I’m going to beat him to it.’ I think he set me up,” he reiterated.
For his part, Schwarzenegger confirmed to the outlet that he did, indeed, set Stallone up. “It’s 100 percent true,” he said in a statement to THR. “In those days we did all kinds of crazy things to get ahead in our rivalry. Luckily for us and everyone else, today, we root for each other. Thank God, because we sure don’t ever need another Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.” Please, Governor, this wound clearly does not need re-opening!