Action icon Sylvester Stallone has stated that the proposed Rambo streaming series “is going to happen.” He even reveals how it will reintroduce audiences back into the long-running franchise. While it had been theorized that the Rambo streaming project would be a prequel about the title character, Stallone has revealed that the series will instead find John Rambo passing the baton to someone else.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stallone explains that, while he wanted the Rambo series to explore the early years of the character that we all know and love to watch wage war (even if he really doesn’t love it himself), the studio wants the series to focus on a new character who takes up the mantle.
“I think it’s going to happen. I wanted to do it like a Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam, where you drop young Rambo in there and he’s this outgoing guy, football captain, and then you see why he becomes Rambo. But what they want to do is a modern-day story where I pass the torch. That’s getting close.”
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Frankly, both ideas will be complicated to pull off. The first would have needed to find another actor to embody the young version of Rambo. Unless the plan was to de-age a 76-year-old Stallone. While the other will need to find an actor that audiences will adhere to just as much as we did with Stallone’s Vietnam vet.
Will the Rambo Series Introduce His Son?
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The idea of a Rambo prequel has been posited by Stallone for several years now, with the actor saying back in 2020 that the franchise would continue “Only as a streaming prequel or not at all.” Stallone has revealed further details of his plans for a prequel as well, saying he “always thought of Rambo when he was 16 or 17 - I hope they can do the prequel — he was the best person you could find. He was the captain of the team; he was the most popular kid in school; super athlete. He was like Jim Thorpe, and the war is what changed him. If you saw him before, he was like the perfect guy.”
Perhaps the Rambo streaming series will include elements of both, with flashbacks detailing the early years of Rambo, all while he passes the torch in the present day. But the question remains, who will pick up the torch?
Well, it could be Rambo’s son, with First Blood author David Morrell revealing back in 2021 that he had been commissioned to do just that. “Rambo would be in his early ’70s now, as Sylvester is,” Morrell explained. “So you’re not going to have a television series with a man of that age as the star. It’s just not currently what people watch. So what they were going to do was have Rambo have a child. And this child was in one of the Gulf Wars, and had returned, and now he was coming back from war the way Rambo had come back [from Vietnam].”
Though he could not get the idea to work at the time, everything may have now fallen into place. Thus, we could be sitting down to watch Rambo Jr. at some point in the near future.
