The Movie Sylvester Stallone Called a Complete Failure

Back when the film was still in rough-cut form, Stallone saw the nearly three-hour runtime and thought his career was over. His exact words?

"You know, that movie was a complete failure. That movie was so bad I wanted to buy it back and burn it; that's not a joke. I put that in Variety; it was that bad. Because it was just overblown, over-long, and I had never seen an actor attacking his own country, it was just very odd. That's why 11 people passed on the film."

Yes, eleven people passed on First Blood — a film that would later become a massive hit and launch one of the most violent and successful franchises in Hollywood. But Stallone wasn't wrong about the original cut. It was bloated, unfocused, and leaned so heavily into Rambo's rage that it risked turning the character into a full-blown villain.

The version that eventually hit theaters was a tight 85 minutes — trimmed down to focus on John Rambo's survival and psychological trauma rather than just another shoot-'em-up. And that edit made all the difference. Instead of coming off as a psychotic drifter with a machine gun, Rambo became a sympathetic antihero: a former Green Beret pushed too far, hunted by small-town cops who didn't know who they were messing with.

But even then, First Blood was a sharp left turn from what audiences were used to. This wasn't Indiana Jones chasing lost artifacts or Bond in a tux. This was a Vietnam vet waging war in the Pacific Northwest — something that looked like pure chaos to parents and pure wish fulfillment to every 13-year-old boy in America.