Sylvester Stallone isn’t known for his forays into horror, but an unmade adaptation of Stephen King's Dolan’s Cadillac would have seen him play one of the horror icon’s villains. Nowadays, Sly Stallone is best known for his tenure playing muscular heroes in ‘80s action flicks like the Rambo sequels or Cobra. While the action genre might be behind his biggest hits, he's shown time and again he's a great dramatic performer too in the likes of the Rocky/Creed franchise or the underrated thriller Copland.
However, in the early 2000s, the actor was attempting to diversify the range of roles he booked, leading to a brief foray into horror with the largely forgotten slasher flop D-Tox. This period in Stallone’s career also saw the actor flirt with the title role in a Stephen King adaptation, Dolan’s Cadillac. At the risk of spoiling the novella, King’s Dolan’s Cadillac is a revenge tale that centers on the eponymous amoral mobster who murders the wife of a schoolteacher, and the subsequent elaborate - and disturbing - revenge plot said schoolteacher is driven to hatch in his grief and angst.
This plan involves Dolan's bulletproof Cadillac, and in an unusual twist, Stallone was set to play the villain of the piece. The part of Dolan would have been a rare villain turn for Stallone, and given how iconic Stephen King’s villains are in the pantheon of screen baddies, it’s easy to see why it appealed. The part was offered to Stallone circa 2001, during the aforementioned Copland/D-Tox era where the actor was trying to branch out to different kinds of characters and genres. Dolan himself is a nasty piece of work in the original story, and taking on the role was likely an attempt to stretch his acting muscles since Stallone had spent the preceding decades often playing unambiguously good guys.
In another interesting bit of casting, Sylvester Stallone was set to star alongside Kevin Bacon, who more often played villainous roles and would have been an unusual choice for the hero. However, the pair eventually dropped out of the production and that version of the movie fell apart. Dolan’s Cadillac was eventually adapted in 2010 as a straight-to-DVD production starring Christian Slater in the title role and Wes Bentley as the teacher seeking revenge.
This Stephen King adaptation wasn’t particularly successful with critics, though, with Slater and Bentley failing to subvert their established screen personas the way Stallone and Bacon had hoped to with their take on Dolan’s Cadillac. As such, this 2010 movie was soon forgotten and the Bacon/Stallone version of Dolan’s Cadillac joined the likes of George A. Romero’s unmade adaptation of The Stand as a potentially great King movie horror audiences never got to see on the big screen.