Sylvester Stallone & Burt Reynolds' Only Movie Together Was An Unexpected Box Office Flop

Screen legends Sylvester Stallone and Burt Reynolds both have some uniquely regrettable entries in their respective filmographies. For Sly, there was the one movie in which he didn't star but directed, which turned out to be a massive flop. There's also stuff like "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot."

Reynolds also had his share of missteps. He deeply regretted his gangster movie flop, "City Heat," with Clint Eastwood which certainly was an extraordinary blunder. Heck, Roger Ebert hated Reynolds' and Eastwood's movie enough to label it a "travesty," and making matters worse was the fact that it followed Reynolds starring in his worst Western thanks to Eastwood. But these are far from the only blemish on the "Smokey and the Bandit" star's record.

In 2001, Stallone and Reynolds starred in a movie that would prove to be as successful a team-up as "City Heat." Directed by '90s action maestro Renny Harlin, "Driven" was a sports action movie set in the world of Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART). What is that? Well, it's basically what you get when you can't secure access to Formula 1. Evidently Stallone, who wrote and produced "Driven," had become enamoured with Formula 1 while shooting another of his less well-received movies, "Judge Dredd," in Europe. But after trying to gain enough access to the sport in order to perfect his script, the actor ran into issues, and reworked the screenplay as a story about CART drivers.  

Sadly, the film was merely a green splat on Rotten Tomatoes waiting to happen. Indeed, today "Driven" bears an even lower score than the "travesty" that was "City Heat." So, what happened? Surely the switch from F1 to CART wasn't that much of a blow to the narrative? Allow me to explain.

In "Driven," Sylvester Stallone played veteran Champ Car and Indy 500 champion Joe "The Hummer" Tanto. In an echo of his many "I don't do that sort of thing any more" action heroes who reluctantly emerge from retirement, Tanto is coaxed back into action to train Kip Pardue's rookie sensation James Roman "Jimmy" Bly, a young driver who has been causing a stir by racking up wins. But he's also drawn the attention of reigning Champ Car champion Beau Brandenburg (Til Schweiger) in the process, who isn't all that pleased to hear about a new challenger rising through the ranks. 

Burt Reynolds plays Carl Henry, team owner of PacWest Racing for whom Jimmy drives. It's Carl that convinces Tanto to come out of retirement and the whole film builds towards the CART FedEx Championship Series, in which Jimmy and his new mentor hope to take the gold.

Writing for ESPN, Stallone described himself as a "curious onlooker of the sport" and explained the genesis of his racing movie. "For years, I watched these guys in their helmets, race after race, and I never knew who they were," he wrote. "I wanted to understand who was living inside the helmet. What's that man's life like?" Sly then spent a good while researching, spending time with race teams and their families to understand the "human aspect" of racing. Once he'd produced a screenplay, however, he found that Hollywood wasn't all that interested in it, and given the film's reception, perhaps he should have taken heed of their reticence?

According to Sylvester Stallone, getting his racing movie made was "a struggle." He wrote, "People kept telling me it couldn't be done, and I had to shop it around Hollywood for four years." But the veteran star persisted, and eventually Warner Bros. agreed to distribute while Stallone reunited with his "Cliffhanger" director Renny Harlin. That was a good move considering their previous collaboration rescued Stallone from a career nadir and helped him regain relevance in the early '90s. At the turn of the century, Stallone was once again experiencing a bit of a lull, and was even considering playing Batman opposite Mark Hamill in a fan film. Surely, then, his sports drama designed to drill into the human element of racing was, much like "Rocky" and its similar approach to sport, destined to succeed ... right?

Well, it didn't succeed. Released on April 27, 2001, "Driven" made just $54.6 million on a $72 million budget and was savaged by critics who lambasted the character development, plot, and CGI. This was far from Stallone's first failure, of course, but considering the man basically forged a whole career off the back of writing one script, it's always interesting to delve into why a Stallone-penned movie fails. If his attempt to get "inside the helmets" of these racers didn't entice audiences, the real-life race footage didn't prove much more effective in that regard. Apparently, Harlin originally produced a four-hour cut of the movie, which was, of course, stripped right the way down for the theatrical version. That can't be the only issue that contributed to the film's failure, however, as Warner Bros. later screened a four-hour cut of "The Batman" which turned out fine when it was streamlined for audiences.

Whatever the case, critics weren't very nice to Stallone's movie. "Driven" has a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 111 reviews. Roger Ebert surmised that Stallone had made "a movie by, for, and about the Attention Deficit Disordered," while Michael O'Sullivan of the Washington Post was even more scathing, describing the film as "a music video shot by a 'Cops' camera crew on crystal meth." It's not surprising, then, that during a Q&A five years after the movie debuted, Stallone was asked about projects he wished he didn't make, and listed "Driven" alongside "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot" and several other duds. Reynolds, meanwhile, seemed to prefer not talking about the film at all, and you can't really blame him.