The first time Sylvester Stallone saw a rough cut of First Blood, he hated it so much he wanted to buy it back.
“I’m embarrassed to say that’s true,” he told Rich Eisen earlier this month of the 1982 film based on David Morrell’s 1972 novel.
Stallone told Howard Stern was so upset with the original cut, which ran more than three hours, that he and his agent tried to buy and burn the negative.
Then he came up with the idea of cutting most of his character’s dialogue. Stallone plays John Rambo, a distressed Vietnam veteran who runs afoul of an abusive small-town sheriff (Brian Dennehy).
“And have other people talk about you – which by the way is not a bad way to live in general, (let) other people fill in the blanks, like a Greek chorus you know? I think it works,” Stallone told Stern as quoted by Ultimate Classic Rock.
The run time wasn’t Stallone’s lone complaint. He also opposed of Rambo dying at the end of First Blood, as the character did in the novel. Director Ted Kotcheff told Entertainment Weekly he and Stallone agreed to shoot an alternate ending where Rambo survives.
It turned out to be a wise decision. When First Blood was test screened for an audience in Las Vegas, the original ending wasn’t well received.
“There was a dead silence,” Kotcheff said in a making-of documentary as quoted by Yahoo! Entertainment. “Then a voice said: ‘If this director is in the audience, he should be strung up from the nearest lamppost.'”
John Rambo survived the final cut, which was trimmed to 93 minutes, and audiences approved. First Blood debuted at No. 1 at the box office on Oct. 22 and remained there for three weeks. It made more than $47 million domestically, according to Box Office Mojo, ranking 13th among that year’s releases.
The film was also a hit with critics, scoring an 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
First Blood spawned four sequels. A prequel, John Rambo, is scheduled to be released on June 7, 2027.
“And the rest is history. It worked,” Stallone told Eisen.
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