One of last week’s big pieces of news was that Sylvester Stallone will be reprising the role of John Rambo for Rambo V, a new installment in the franchise that’s set to film later this year and be released in Fall 2019. This time around, Stallone will do battle with the Mexican cartel; after a friend’s daughter is kidnapped, he crosses the border and does what he does best.
Of course, this isn’t the first time a new Rambo project has been reported by the trades, with several different iterations of “the continuing adventures of John Rambo” popping up in the ten years since the release of 2008’s ultra-gory Rambo. At one point, Rambo was going to battle a cult that kidnaps his daughter, while another project was set to reboot the franchise.
But the most interesting potential iteration of Rambo V was going to be an entirely different beast altogether (…quite literally), with Rambo battling his very first inhuman adversary!
Back in 2009, one year after the release of Rambo, Nu Image/Millennium Films announced another installment of the franchise, which was said to be placing the title character into a whole new genre. Initial reports indicated it’d essentially be a sci-fi film, set in the Pacific Northwest and centered on a top secret military operation to create super soldiers. Naturally, things go very wrong with that operation, and Rambo comes in to clean up the mess.
Stallone himself, however, soon clarified that the plot synopsis for what was being referred to as Rambo V: The Savage Hunt was wrong. Rather than being a Universal Soldier-type movie, as websites were reporting at the time, Stallone cleared the air and revealed that The Savage Hunt was actually going to be more of a Predator-type monster movie!
“It’s not a Universal Soldier… it’s not me fighting a super soldier… it’s actually a feral beast,” Stallone explained back in September 2009. “It’s a… thing. It’s this amalgamation of fury and intelligence and pure, unadulterated rage. It’s before men became… hu-men. This is when they were still inhuman. And so, what [Rambo] confronts is something that is everyone’s nightmare. But in no sense of the word does he go against the Dolph Lundgren or Jean-Claude Van Damme super soldier.”
Stallone continued, “He’s going against a feral beast that has absolute cunning and intelligence and a will to survive that is only matched by Rambo’s. And that’s what makes it uniquely different… man’s conscience fighting his dark, dangerous, uncontrollable subconscious. Very similar to the plot in Forbidden Planet… when the doctor couldn’t control his mind and his subconscious took over and became a savage killing machine. It’s your worst nightmare. You’re battling your primitive self.”
According to reports at the time, Rambo V: The Savage Hunt‘s plot was inspired by James Byron Huggins’ 1999 novel Hunter, which Stallone had at one point acquired the rights to. In the novel, a beast (“a half-human abomination created by a renegade agency through a series of outlawed genetic experiments”) is loose somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, and a tracker by the name of Nathaniel Hunter is tasked with taking it down before it reaches civilization.
Rambo vs. a bestial monster. Sigh. What could have been.
