A new Rambo movie is officially in the works, with Sylvester Stallone playing the one-man murder machine as either a Texas rancher or a Republican politician pretending to be a Texas rancher, but that’s apparently not the only Rambo-related project Stallone has been trying to make in the decade since he last picked up a machine gun. As noted in a Deadline story this week about Stallone’s new Balboa Productions development label, one of the projects he’s working on his an adaptation of James Byron Huggins’ Hunter, which is about a master tracker who gets hired to find a “half-human terror created by a renegade agency that is threatening to wreak havoc on civilization.”
Apparently, Stallone has had his eye on this book for a long time, and Deadline casually notes that he had initially planned to turn it into a Rambo movie as if the idea of Rambo hunting a monster is totally normal. Don’t get us wrong, it should be totally normal and we would happily go live in the alternate reality where Rambo became a sci-fi series around 2009, but it seems a little ridiculous for our reality. Then again, a story about John Rambo hunting down a “monster” only to realize that the half-human terror is just another misunderstood soul who has been corrupted by the misdeeds of the U.S. government seems perfect. It would be more interesting than Rambo going off on some right-wing fantasy to slaughter Mexican drug dealers.
Either way, that movie is not happening, but Stallone is at least developing a similar movie where he plays an expert hunter who is not named John Rambo.