Sylvester Stallone is a brilliant actor, screenwriter, and director. Since the start of his career, the actor has consistently proven himself as a formidable one-man army and has made some of the best movies of all time. Yet, his career has not been without several commercial and critical failures.
Sylvester Stallone on Making Rocky Balboa an Astronaut
Sylvester Stallone, before his Rocky fame, was just a nobody struggling to make ends meet. Agitated by not being able to get any worthy roles, he went on to write the script for his Oscar-winning Rocky and became one of the biggest stars overnight.
While he thus went on to become one of the greatest actors in cinema, people did not really expect him to succeed after the first film. Stallone, in an old interview with Roger Ebert, stated:
After ‘Rocky,’ I was almost set up in the eyes of the media to make a flop… I said some things that did not exactly endear me. My ego got blown out of proportion.
He then went on to make Paradise Alley and FIST after Rocky, but the movies were not as big a success and something that fans wanted from him. Hence, he decided to make Rocky 2. But what quirked him the most after his announcement of the sequel was that people thought he was making a comeback, which made him proclaim to Ebert,
There is this one question, which when I hear it makes me very mad. They all ask me, Will ‘Rocky II’ save your career? Is this my comeback, they wanna know? Will it pull my career out of the toilet? I didn’t think I was doin’ so bad. I’ve never made a film that lost money. If ‘Rocky II’ was a comeback, I coulda made it a lot more commercial, Like, Rocky coulda been an astronaut.
Well, despite the industry expectations and weights, Stallone has consistently proven himself despite the many bombs he has had in his career.
Sylvester Stallone’s Worst Film of All Time
Sylvester Stallone has made and starred in some of the finest movies of all time. From Rocky to Rambo and Cliffhanger, the Oscar-winning star’ journey in the film industry has been nothing but deeply inspirational. Yet, there have been times when he has failed to hit the mark, and it resulted in critically and commercially bombed movies like Over the Top and Oscar.
In a 2006 interview with Ain’t It Cool News, when asked what his worst movie is, Stallone stated,
The worst film I’ve ever made by far… maybe one of the worst films in the entire solar system, including alien productions we’ve never seen… A flatworm could write a better script then STOP! OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT. In some countries – China, I believe – running STOP! OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT once a week on government television has lowered the birth rate to zero. If they ran it twice a week, I believe in twenty years China would be extinct. Does that put it in perspective?
While those are certainly some strong words, he is not wrong, for even now, the movie is ranked among the worst movies of all time. Yet, it is commendable that despite the failure of the movie and numerous other movies, Stallone has no plans of slowing down and is constantly determined to bounce back.
Rocky II can be streamed on Amazon Prime.
