Here's every unmade horror movie Sylvester Stallone has been linked to, and why they didn't happen. Sly Stallone has portrayed two of the most famous action heroes of all time with Rocky and Rambo, and most of his best-known movies are from the genre. While he's experimented with everything from sci-fi to comedy throughout his career, misfires like Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot usually sent him back to action.
Stallone hasn't really made a straight-up horror movie in his career either. There are elements of a slasher movie in 1986's Cobra, but that's mainly an action flick. The closest he's come is 2002's Eye See You - AKA D-Tox - where he plays a suicidal cop being stalked in an isolated rehab clinic by a serial killer. The movie is an intriguing blend of thriller and slasher, though its slow pace and humorless tone make it a bit of a slog. While he's mostly avoided horror, he's circled a few genre projects over the years.
Here's a rundown of Sylvester Stallone's unmade horror movies, and why they didn't get made.
Hunter / Rambo V: The Savage Hunt
Hunter is based on the novel by James Byron Huggins, which sees the world's greatest tracker being tasked by the military to hunt down a strange, bloodthirsty creature in the Arctic Circle. Hunter leads a team of hardened mercenaries against the monster, who is quickly revealed to be near unkillable and was seemingly created in a lab.
Stallone has been trying to get Hunter made for over 20 years, and had creative input while the novel was being written. He famously tried to adapt it as Rambo V: The Savage Hunt back in 2009 - swapping out Hunter for Rambo - but he quickly changed his mind. The book has the makings of a fun creature feature, but while Stallone is still developing the project it has yet to move before cameras.
Fatalis
Sylvester Stallone must have a thing for monster movies, as one of his other notable abandoned horror projects was Fatalis, a gory novel about saber-toothed cats attacking L.A. It was announced in 1998 that Stallone would lead the movie adaptation of Jeff Rovin's novel, where he would play anthropologist hero Jim Grand. Universal was set to produce the project, but very little was heard about it following the initial announcement, with no director or co-stars being linked to it.
Isobar
Isobar is considered one of the great, unmade sci-fi films and can be summed up as Snowpiercer meets Alien. In fact, it started life as a reunion between director Ridley Scott and artist H.R. Giger called The Train, before both got off the project. Isobar was set in a post-apocalyptic future where trains are the only way to travel long distances.
On the maiden voyage of one such train traveling from L.A. to London, a tentacled plant monster breaks out and starts killing passengers, and it's up to Sylvester Stallone's hero and a cast that would have featured Kim Basinger and Jim Belushi to stop it. Isobar was set to be a huge blockbuster project with Roland Emmerich set to direct and Rick Baker designing the monster, but the bankruptcy of production company Carolco derailed the project.