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Stallone's Rambo Prequel Is The Same As His Rocky Idea
Sylvester Stallone has ideas for two of his iconic franchises - Rocky and Rambo - except they're both almost identical, and one is doomed to fail.

Stallone's Rambo Prequel Is The Same As His Rocky Idea

Sylvester Stallone’s idea for a Rambo prequel is actually almost identical to his plans for the continuation of the Rocky franchise. Sylvester Stallone emphatically burst onto the scene in 1976 with Rocky, and has since become one of the biggest and most well-known action stars of all time. Though Stallone’s work has seen him conquer many genres, his most memorable roles are the ones he has reprised numerous times—namely, Rocky Balboa and John Rambo. Despite being very different franchises, Rocky and Rambo share a number of parallels, with Stallone’s continued involvement the driving force behind their enduring legacies.

Both the Rocky and Rambo franchises reached their peak in the 1980s, then dwindled in the ’90s. The mid-’00s saw Stallone bring back Rocky and Rambo with revivals that followed an older version of their respective heroes struggling against their own natures and the passage of time. Each has since had at least one more legacy sequel, with Rambo: Last Blood and the well-reviewed Creed spinoff movies, which have now shifted focus entirely away from Balboa in favor of Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed.

However, Stallone has plans to bring both characters back again in exactly the same way—by giving them a prequel. For both characters, Stallone’s idea is almost identical: to explore their respective teenage years and the events that shaped them into the iconic characters they later became. Though the idea for Stallone’s Rocky prequel is generally sound and comes with inherent potential, using the same premise to explore the character of John Rambo would be a particularly bizarre choice.

Stallone’s Rocky prequel would follow a 17-year-old Rocky as he takes his first steps towards becoming a world-class fighter, interacting with the boxing scene of the 1960s in the process. However, teenage Rambo experiencing the last of his high school years prior to shipping out to Vietnam simply wouldn’t work in the same way, due to the inherent nature of his character. The difference between the characters that stop Stallone’s idea from working is that the Rocky prequel would actively explore the iconic character’s origin, whereas the Rambo prequel pitched by Stallone would explore the years leading up to Rambo’s defining moments. This one key difference highlights that perhaps Stallone is simply recycling his ideas, as it works far better for one than the other.

In addition, Stallone’s 1960s-set Rocky prequel show could feature many younger versions of characters from the franchise, as Rocky’s origin story is tied up in his boxing career. However, Rambo’s closest friends and allies stemmed from his military career, meaning that his high school years would likely prove fruitless if explored with the intention of establishing a John Rambo origin story. This just further evidences the way that Stallone may have misunderstood what the Rambo franchise needs, even though the idea works for Rocky.

Stallone’s other idea for a Vietnam-set Rambo prequel could potentially work, although it would come with its own issues, most notably that it wouldn’t be an innovation of other Rambo movies. Though the story of John Rambo’s high school years is certainly something that the dark and violent Rambo franchise hasn’t yet touched on, it simply wouldn’t gel with the tone of the established character, and would almost certainly prove jarring when considered alongside the established action-driven narratives of his existing movies. Using the same idea for both franchises may have worked once, but with regards to a prequel, Rambo will need an entirely different approach than Rocky.