Update: Sylvester Stallone Does NOT Plan to Follow Rambo 5 With Rocky 7
Posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 by Brendon Connelly
[UPDATE: CHUD readers have debunked this story. Apparently, there's been some mistranslation and Stallone was speaking in the past tense, referring to the last Rocky film and not any plans for more. This confusion seems to have affected every single possible English language source that I had researched.]
[UPDATE 2: Stallone's publicist (via AICN) has debunked this story definitively. Original story follows.]
After Sylvester Stallone wraps his fifth Rambo, apparently a curious creature feature and now officially given the go ahead to start shooting in the spring, it looks like Stallone is looking to once again revive his other iconic turn/cash cow. It seemed like a minor miracle to me that Rocky 6 was so well received and so going for a seventh roll of the dice seems at first like a gamble too far, but Stallone’s feeling quite philosophical:
When I was 21 years old and at drama school. My teacher said to me, ‘If you ever put your head out there, thousands of people will try to cut it off, but that’s exactly what you need to do as an artist.’ “I know it’s ludicrous and everyone would laugh. I would laugh about it. But I also know that I’d be successful if I can make this a film about becoming older, not about boxing but about myself.
Do you know what, I think he’s right, actually. Rock on Rocky 7.
He was reportedly speaking to Tele 5 in Germany, since which quotes have spread like wild fire across the web. I sourced my quotes from Teen Say.
Here’s just a touch more of what he said:
Even my wife says, ‘Don’t do it. You’re embarrassing the kids’. But I told her, ‘If I don’t try I’ll be a really unhappy man.’ You have to do it. Artists like me have to go through the dark over and over again.
Perhaps a leap into the true darkness of a non-franchise film would be good. Actually, that could include The Expendables, which still seems to be set pretty safely in Stallone’s 80s-brewed comfort zone, so maybe dabbling in a new genre would be necessary. Okay, basically, I’m wanting Stallone to do his long promised Edgar Allan Poe film. Am I alone in that?
