Sylvester Stallone backs artificial intelligence: “If you don’t get on board, it will run you over”

At 80, the creator of Rocky and Rambo breaks with Hollywood consensus and openly defends artificial intelligence in film. He even pitched a young Rambo who would be “half human, half AI”. The producers said no — but his message has already travelled the world.

Few stars embody reinvention quite like Sylvester Stallone. The actor who wrote Rocky when nobody believed in him, who turned Rambo into a global icon and who is still working at 80, has gone against the current once again. This time, on artificial intelligence.

In an interview on the podcast The Overlap, Stallone said artificial intelligence “is here to stay”, fully aware the remark would get him into trouble in an industry where the subject remains taboo. He described it as an avalanche no one can stop, and acknowledged that the creative community’s complaints are legitimate. But his conclusion was blunt:

“If you don’t get on board, it will run you over.”

The Rambo that never was

Stallone is not speaking in the abstract. He had already explained on Power Players that he pitched producers a “half human, half AI” project in which he himself would play a teenage John Rambo. The idea was to show the character at 18, before Vietnam, when he was the popular captain of his high-school team and enlisted thinking it would be a two-week adventure.

As precedents he cited the digital de-ageing of the cast of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and the 1980s Harrison Ford who reappeared in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

The producers chose a different path. The Rambo prequel is already under way, directed by Finland’s Jalmari Helander (Sisu), with Noah Centineo as the young soldier during his Green Beret years in Vietnam. Stallone serves as executive producer and will not appear on camera. Release is set for 4 June 2027.

A father’s advice

The actor has also brought the debate home. He has advised his daughter, actress Scarlet Rose Stallone, to look towards video games or consider other paths, convinced that acting will become ever harder in the age of AI.

Rocky returns to the big screen

His comments arrive at a particularly symbolic moment. On 6 November, Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky opens, with Anthony Ippolito as a young Stallone fighting to get made the film that changed everything in 1976. It is the story of a man who bet on himself when the industry was closing its doors.

Image: Sylvester Stallone at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Photo: Georges Biard / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).