Looks Like We’re Getting A Rambo Prequel From Lionsgate

Film studio Lionsgate have acquired the rights to both The Expendables and Rambo franchises.

THR has broken the news that Lionsgate are moving forward with new additions to Rambo and The Expendables, having sealed a massive rights deal with Millennium Medium. Lionsgate will handle international distribution for the prequel John Rambo, due to film to Thailand next year, as well as developing and producing all future works spinning out of The Expendables franchise.

“This deal expands Lionsgate’s portfolio of genre-defining action franchises and reinforces our commitment to delivering world-class IP across multiple platforms,” Lionsgate COO Brian Goldsmith said in a statement, which is pretty standard bizspeak boilerplate. But this is interesting stuff nonetheless.

The Expendables is sort of a plug ‘n’ play action franchise built around Sylvester Stallone‘s Barney Ross and starring whoever’s available at the time. The only actors who have appeared in all four films are Stallone, Jason Statham, Randy Couture, and Dolph Lundgren, but Jet Li, Iko Uwais, Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, Terry Crews, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even Harrison Ford have turned up at one point or another. The series has never been great (the second, directed by Con Air‘s Simon West, is easily the best) but “mercenaries battle evil” is a pretty robust and flexible concept, so there’s no reason why it couldn’t run and run. The elephant in the room is that Stallone is 79 (yeah, that snuck up on me too) and is not going to be running and gunning for much longer. Maybe Stallone can step into the mentor/elder statesman role going forward, shepherding anew generation of murder machines? How would his ego handle that?

And then there’s John Rambo, which will see Black Adam’s Noah Centineo step into the title role and, presumably, tell the story of his experiences as a Green Beret during the Vietnam War. Sisu director Jalmari Helander is calling the shots, so I’d expect some spectacular action and gore. The problem here is that doing a prequel now feels a bit off. Where Rambo is as a cultural icon these days is light years away from the character we met all the way back in 1982’s First Blood, so it’s going to be difficult to square that circle. Guess we’ll see how it goes soon enough.