The three films that were supposed to kill off Rocky and Rambo

Sylvester Stallone’s career owes a lot to decisions to reverse the killing off of John Rambo and Rocky Balboa… Spoilers lie ahead for the umpteen Rocky and Rambo films… Currently making it way thought production is the upcoming I Am Rocky, the film telling the story of how Sylvester Stallone wrote 1976’s Rocky, and held ... The three films that were supposed to kill off Rocky and Rambo

Sylvester Stallone’s career owes a lot to decisions to reverse the killing off of John Rambo and Rocky Balboa…

Spoilers lie ahead for the umpteen Rocky and Rambo films…

Currently making it way thought production is the upcoming I Am Rocky, the film telling the story of how Sylvester Stallone wrote 1976’s Rocky, and held his nerve to insist he take the title tole as well.

Peter Farrelly is directing the movie, which will extend the cinema story of Rocky, albeit in a slightly different form, past its 50th birthday. It’s a remarkable feat, with Stallone himself being Oscar-nominated twice for playing Balboa across the eight films the character’s directly appeared in to date.

But also, that wasn’t how things were supposed to pan out.

In a new interview, Stallone has been chatting about the original plan for director Ryan Coogler’s superb 2015 feature, Creed. This was the film where we meet an older, lonely Rocky Balboa, who’s diagnosed with cancer during the course of the film. You thus get the dual narratives of Michael B Jordan’s Adonis Creed trying to emerge victorious in the boxing ring, and Stallone’s Rocky Balboa trying to, well, emerge alive. Given he appears in Creed II, it’s not much of a spoiler to suggest which way things go.

Still, Coogler had intended that Creed be the swansong for Balboa, and was pushing for the character to meet his maker. It was Sylvester Stallone who, ultimately, kept him alive. As he explained to GQ, “Ryan Coogler kept pushing it.”

Still, “I didn’t want to do it because the way he had written it, Rocky dies. He gets Lou Gehrig’s disease. And I said, I have a big thing about characters like that dying. I’d much rather them get on a train going somewhere, and you never see them again. But to die, it will just bum the audience out completely.”

The second of two planned big screen deaths for Rocky Balboa was thus averted.

Stallone had wrestled this previously with the ill-fated Rocky V. On paper, this should have been the perfect ending for the character, too. The late John G Avildsen, who’d directed the original film, was back to helm the movie, and this was tonally far closer to the 1976 Oscar-winner than the hugely jingoistic (and ridiculously fun) Rocky IV.

Rocky V was thus to bring the curtain down on the series, and see us spending time with a Rocky Balboa feeling the aftermath of Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago smacking seven shades of shit out of him in the previous film. After all, in Rocky IV, basically the half of the film that’s not flashbacks and montages is establishing that Drago has a punch that’s squillions times harder than any other human being, illustrated perfectly by him killing Carl Weathers’ Apollo Creed in the ring.

It’s therefore not unreasonable to suggest that Balboa might be feeling after-effects of the bout, and the start of Rocky V does address this. At the start of the story, we see things pick up directly after the ending of the previous film, and Balboa is in a state. The resultant film takes Rocky back to the streets as he – in a precursor to the Creed movies – finds a protégé in the form of Tommy Gunn (played by Tommy Morrison.)

Naturally, this ends in fisticuffs – again, it’s hard to declare that a spoiler – and the script Stallone penned had Balboa dying in the arms of his beloved Adrian at the end of his said fight. The last words of the film were supposed to be “As long as there are people willing to meet challenges of life and not surrender until their dreams become realities, the world will always have their Rockys.”

In the end though, the finale that Sylvester Stallone had written wasn’t actually shot. It’d certainly been the intent to film it, as the website Total Rocky recounted. It quoted Avildsen saying “when I read that I said, wow what a great way to go out. What a beautiful ending! So we started shooting the movie and a couple of weeks into the shooting I get a call from the head of the studio and they said, ‘Oh by the way Rocky’s not going to die. Batman doesn’t die, Superman, James Bond, these people don’t die.”

A fresh ending was put together that kept Rocky Balboa with breath in his lungs, even if the commercial and critical response to the film seemed to have knocked him out anyway. Certainly Avildsen, for one, felt the decision to have Balboa survive was fatal to the film, and Stallone seemed to be suitably bruised too by a box office run that featured Oscar, Rocky V and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. It’d take the 1993 double bill of Cliffhanger and Demolition Man to temporarily revive his fortunes.

Stallone’s other iconic character, John Rambo, was also never intended to make it to quite so many movies. The much darker original film, First Blood, saw John Rambo as a Vietnam vet without a home, drifting, and evading capture by law enforcement. A surprise hit at the US box office in 1982, the original denouement of the source novel sees the character of Rambo breathe his last. This was duly scripted too and, in contrast to Rocky V, the scene was also filmed.

There’s an alternate ending to First Blood therefore, that you can see here…

A pair of reasons this time brought about the change. Firstly, test audiences, having rooted for the character of John Rambo throughout, very much took against the extremely sombre finale that they were offered. Furthermore, in this case, Sylvester Stallone was keen for the character to survive. It’d prove to be a very savvy decision for his bank balance too, and he’d stand his ground, claiming later that he’d threatened to quit the film.

Rambo walks away from First Blood therefore, and Stallone would have two sequels made and released by the time the 1980s drew to a close.

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Certainly, in the case of Rocky V and First Blood, Stallone enjoyed the benefit of making it to the end credits of both films. Not just for the instant rush of Rambo films, but also when it came time to try and resurrect his career in the 2000s. At that stage, off the back of films such as Driven, Get Carter and Eye See You, his career – not for the first time – was firmly in the doldrums. It took a relatively low budget gamble on bringing Rocky back for the well-received Rocky Balboa to turn things around.

The success of that in turn invertedly led to a trilogy of Creed movies, in which Stallone appears in two. Plus, two more Rambo films as well.

In all, these are two characters who Stallone has played 13 times on the big screen, and – had things gone a little differently – that number might have stopped at six. As things stand, the 50th anniversary of Rocky is going to be marked with yet another movie, and even though Stallone won’t be making an appearance, the door remains just a tiny bit ajar for Rocky Balboa and John Rambo to find a way back yet again.