I thought Sylvester Stallone‘s return in Rambo back in 2008 was a bloody, throat-ripping good time. It wasn’t high cinema, but it was exactly what I wanted and what The Expendables franchise has so far been unable to duplicate. However, on a reported budget of $50 million, the $113.2 million worldwide box office returns weren’t exactly the kind of numbers today’s films need to make to get an immediate sequel.
Had that number been $150 million I think we would have seen Rambo V: The Savage Hunt as the originally planned fifth film was said to be titled at one point, going as far back as August 2009. In fact, the film even had an official synopsis at one point:
John Rambo (Stallone) could track anyone – or anything – on earth. Now the military desperately needs him for a mission that his ultra-sensitive instincts tell him he should refuse. A beast is loose somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. It has already decimated a secret research facility and annihilated a squad of elite military guards. And the raging creature is headed south toward civilization, ready to wreak bloody devastation.
It’s a job that Rambo and his 22-year-old hunting partner, Beau Brady, can’t turn down, but they and a highly skilled special forces team discover the prey is a terror beyond their wildest imagination, a half-human abomination created by a renegade agency through a series of outlawed genetic experiments. It has man’s cunning, a predator’s savageness and a prehistoric power that has transcended the ages. And even if Rambo and Beau survive its unrelenting hunger for human blood, they’ll still have to confront the grim reality that it may have grown immortal.
That film obviously never came to be, but now a report from SplendidMedien (via ComingSoon) suggests Rambo V may be back in the works.
With a screenplay said to have been written by Stallone, who reportedly describes it as a new Rambo in the same vein as No Country for Old Men, the film will find Rambo going up against a Mexican cartel. Avi Lerner is said to be producing.
You up for one more turn with John Rambo?
