Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the two biggest action movie stars, had a real rivalry.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is the unforgettable T-800 from Terminator, Sylvester Stallone is the star of Rocky, Rambo and more recently the Expendables franchise. Since the 1970s, these two stars of the big screen have established themselves as stars of muscular blockbusters, in which they do not hesitate to use fists to destroy their enemies.
Exacerbated by the public and the film industry, this rivalry was further accentuated in the 1980s by their respective box office successes. “We competed on everything,” Arnold Schwarzenegger recalls in the Netflix documentary about him. “Who’s the most vicious? Who’s the toughest? Who uses the biggest knives? Who uses the biggest guns? Sly and I were at war.” To the point that, according to Sylvester Stallone, they “couldn’t even stand to be in the same room.”
Today, Arnold Schwarzenegger sees this rivalry as one of the driving forces behind his film career: “Without Stallone, I might not have been as motivated in the eighties to make the kind of films that I did and worked as hard as I did.”
But the competition between the two actors sometimes reaches extremes: in 1991, Arnold Schwarzenegger pretended to be interested in the film Stop or My Mother Will Shoot so that Stallone hastened to steal the role from him in this film, which ultimately was a commercial and critical failure.
Since the 1990s, the two actors have become very good friends. Even to the point of putting their “rivalry” aside to share the poster in Expendables: Special Forces in 2010 or in Escape in 2013.
In 2012, Schwarzenegger even told the Journal du Dimanche that this rivalry was “dramatized by the studios to sell even more tickets”. And concludes: “It’s Hollywood that made us enemies!”
