When it comes to the battle of the brawns, it would be hard to separate Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, but if it’s brains you’re after, Arnie might have the upper hand. Back in the ’90s, Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to play a little trick on Stallone. Both making some of the best action movies ever, Stallone wound up taking a a role in a real stinker, just to spite his Austrian adversary.
Stallone has made plenty of great films – perhaps more than Schwarzenegger, if we’re being honest – but he truly slipped up when he accepted ’90s movie Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. A lowly 4% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, that one, and not often mentioned (we wonder why).
Turns out, Stallone only took the job after executives told him that if he didn’t want it, the role would go to his rival, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not willing to let his nemesis get the better of him, Stallone snapped it up and regretted making the thriller movie ever since.
At a Q+A session back in 2017 at Beyond Fest, Schwarzenegger revealed he knew the comedy movie was going to be terrible from skimming the script. Really, he could have just declined, but there was an opportunity to play with Stallone, and the Terminator couldn’t pass that up.
“So I went in – this was during our war – I said to myself, I’m going to leak out that I have tremendous interest,” Schwarzenegger said. “I know the way it works in Hollywood. I would then ask for a lot of money. So then they’d say, ‘Let’s go give it to Sly. Maybe we can get him for cheaper.'”
“So they told Sly, ‘Schwarzenegger’s interested. Here’s the press clippings. He’s talked about that. If you want to grab that one away from him, that is available’,” Schwarzenegger remembered. “And he went for it! He totally went for it. A week later, I heard about it, ‘Sly is signing now to do this movie.’ And I said, [pumps fist] ‘Yes!'”
It’s an incredibly crafty move from Schwarzenegger, but you have to applaud the sheer spite of it all. He might laugh here, but watching the Terminator movies in order will tell you, he’s not immune to producing tripe.