After years of will-he-won't-he development stories, Sylvester Stallone has kicked off 2015 with the announcement that he will shortly be revisiting 'Nam-vet one-man-army John Rambo. Taking to the Twitters, he revealed that the fifth Rambo movie will almost certainly also be the final one, since he's confirmed its title as Last Blood.
We've been here several times before, since the bluntly-titled fourth Rambo in 2008. The fifth film was originally touted as a south-of-the-border cartel kidnap thriller. Then it went weirdly sci-fi, then back to its original form. And then it became nothing. "The character came full circle [in the fourth film]; he went home," Sly told us in 2010. "For Rambo to go on another adventure might be misinterpreted as a mercenary gesture and not necessary."
Then in 2011 came the news that Conan The Barbarian writer Sean Hood had turned in a screenplay called The Last Stand, which Hood described as a small-town thriller in the vein of First Blood, and as Rambo's Unforgiven. Then there was a pitch for a TV series, before last June there were reports that German company Splendid Film had picked up the Rambo V movie rights, and that the plot once again involved Rambo up against a Mexican cartel. The comparison Stallone was throwing around at that point was with No Country For Old Men.
Whether that's the same screenplay Hood submitted (based on an as-yet unspecified novel), or a return to earlier drafts remains to be seen. It's also not clear yet whether Sly is planning to direct himself, although he has certainly had a recent hand in the writing process.
As the Tweetings specify, Rambo: Last Blood comes in a year when Stallone is also returning to his other signature role as Rocky Balboa in Creed. He'll follow those with a gangster biopic of Gregory 'The Grim Reaper' Scarpa.
Busy times in the Stallone household then. We'll next see him in John Herzfeld's ensemble drama Reach Me, which goes straight to DVD in the UK on February 5.