You can definitely list this one under, “What the…?!?”

Incredible Love, the first Bollywood film to be made at Universal Studios, has lined up the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Terminator franchise), Sylvester Stallone (Rocky and Rambo series), Brandon Routh (Superman Returns and the upcoming sequel Man of Steel) and Linda Hamilton (also from The Terminator series) to appear.

But don’t get ahead of yourselves excited at the prospects of them in full-on action-mode blowing stuff up. They’re only walk-on parts (i.e. playing themselves).

Over the past few months there have been rumors that Sylvester Stallone would revisiting (again) the role of John Rambo.

I’d never put much stock in these rumors as Stallone appears to have a full slate ahead of him with the Death Wish remake and the ever gestating Edgar Allan Poe biopic.

However, you can’t keep a good action hero down and with Rambo’s $100 million worldwide gross Harvey Weinstein wanted to continue the franchise and keep the iconic character on the bigscreen.

It would seem that he got what he wanted (much to the disapointment of Mick Jagger).

Are you freaking kidding me? Meet the Spartans is number one at the box office this weekend?

It’s estimated that it brought in $18.7MM vs second place Rambo at $18.2MM. Cloverfield fell 68% from last weekend - a second week drop of that magnitude usually means that a movie has received horrible word of mouth advertising. I knew it was going to split audiences big time into love it or hate it, but it seems that everyone who was going to see it went on opening weekend.

By Vic Holtreman

Short version: If you’re a fan of the previous films, Stallone’s awesome new Rambo will blow you away.

After having seen some of the Rambo reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes and the overall rating of only 35%, I fully expected to be disappointed by Sylvester Stallone’s second revisiting of an iconic character. So you can imagine that it came as a complete shock to me when I ended up loving it.

Rambo opens with real footage of the nightmarish abuses that are currently going on in Burma. It’s very disturbing and at the very least I believe that Stallone is hoping that this will draw attention to what’s going on over there with the military murdering innocent men, women and children on a daily basis.

From there the film cuts to John Rambo in the Thai jungle (Thailand borders Burma) where he is out with a local man wrangling cobras. The local town’s main attraction involves shows were men taunt cobras, pythons and other dangerous snakes. It seems that he has been living there for a long time - living a spartan, simple existence among the local people.

Thanks to Cinematical for pointing out that the official site for the upcoming Stallone movie Rambo has been updated.

Above is a look at what the site looks like and you can click on the image to visit it. As Cinematical points out, although the framework is laid out in a really cool Flash interface, there’s not a whole lot yet on the site beyond what we’ve already seen. There are a lot of “coming soon” sections right now, but it looks like there will be a lot of cool games and the like shortly, so keep an eye on it if you’re interested.

And yes, the final title is just plain old Rambo. The film opens on January 25th, 2008.

Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe it’s the lack of interesting “modern” franchise characters; but I find myself looking forward to Rambo or John Rambo or whatever they decide to call the upcoming film in the series.

It seems like only yesterday that Stallone was down on his luck and unable to get a film financed. But following the success of Rocky Balboa he seems to be the hottest director/former action star this side of Clint Eastwood.

I’ll be honest with you, I was never really a fan of Sly when he was in his prime. I liked the occasional film such a Cliffhanger and my personal guilty pleasure Tango and Cash, although that does costar Kurt “god” Russell. However following his stint on that other movie related website last year (okay, I’ll mention them: AICN) I decided that he seemed like a nice, humble guy who deserved a break in this CGI infested world. I then went out and bought the Rocky and Rambo box sets and finally discovered the genius of Stallone.

Which brings me nicely to the new Rambo film.

There was a YouTube version of the official trailer for the new Rambo movie making the rounds yesterday. Well here’s a higher res and better quality version of it.

It’s toned WAY down from the previous footage that I had on the site a while back and is more of a standard trailer, suitable for all audiences. Looks like classic Rambo to me and I’m looking forward to this one.

[UPDATED] Just the other day I commented on how movie studios seem to be in a current trend of liking longer movie titles. At least when it comes to movie titles, longer is not always better (oh, grow up).
Anyway, the word today was that the studio had just renamed Sylvester Stallone’s fourth Rambo movie from the simple and effective:

John Rambo

to the longer and cliche’d:

Rambo to Hell and Back

If this new title had been the first one out I might not have minded it, but compared to the first one it seems kind of hokey.

Here’s a simple but pretty cool poster for the new John Rambo Rambo movie, which opens January 25, 2008 (Click for a larger version). The release date is a head scratcher because January (and it appears September, too) is the dumping ground for movies that studios don’t want to promote and instead just let die at the box office. I guess they just want to settle for the tax write-off.

This is confusing, because the the very bloody and awesome preview suggests Stallone, who wrote and directed, has a big hit on his and the studio’s hands. Rambo’s return is welcome, especially now, to come in and save the day (with a little bit of angst).

This week’s podcast has a little bit of news on The Dark Knight, Iron Man, the upcoming Terminator movies and Stallone’s John Rambo. Also some TV coverage regarding the ill-advised Jericho cancellation and the overly jam-packed Smallville Season 6 finale.

I apologize for a couple of skips and the abrupt ending, it seems my connection was a bit “iffy” today. :-\

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