Diesel vs. The Rock. Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris. Betty White vs. Bea Arthur. Hollywood has seen plenty of hard-bodied warriors whose on-screen rivalries were only, uh, rivaled by their real-life counterparts. Yet all of these pale into petty squabbles compared to the battle of titans that dominated ’80s action movies: The Inegalitarian Stallion vs. The Eggernator.
From the moment they met, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger claimed to have hated each other’s guts. According to Stallone, Schwarzenegger drew first blood at the ’77 Golden Globes when Austria’s Best Newcomer kept making fun of Rocky’s many losses. To counter the shade being thrown, the southpaw threw a vase of flowers at Arnie. After these volleys of narcissism (and narcissuses), Stallone later said that this was the beginning of a “violent hatred” so intense that Sly would get angry just thinking about having to be “on the same planet” as the Total Recall star.
Tri-Star Pictures
But aside from the odd playful noogie at an awards event, the beef between Hollywood’s two beefiest boys never turned bloody. Instead, their feud was more of a Cold War — complete with its own (prop) arms race. In the quest to become Hollywood’s biggest guns guy, both actors tried to one-up the other’s movies by having the bigger guns, the bigger baddies, or the bigger body counts. It’s no coincidence that Rambo: First Blood Part II and Commando, which came out mere months apart in 1985, feel like they’re trying to outdo each other the Chicago Way: Commando pulls a knife …
20th Century Fox
Rambo pulls a bigger, custom-made knife.
Tri-Star Pictures
Rambo sends 74 baddies to the morgue …
Commando sends 74 baddies to the morgue in a single scene.
And if you think that’s just a weird coincidence, you’re forgetting that 1985 is and always will be the only year in film history that had not one but two movies where the hero saves the day by picking up a comically huge heavy machine gun and literally singlehandedly mowing down dozens of soldiers like a one-man attack helicopter. All while being inexplicably topless and glistening.
Tri-Star Pictures
The fact that the rivalry became a nice boost to their careers (and that they are now besties) has led some to wonder if the Stallone-Schwarzenegger feud had been fabricated from the start. But whether it was a proper feud, a publicity stunt, or just some good-natured hypermasculine competitiveness, what’s definitely true is that there was nothing good-natured about the way Stallone played his part. Very much the Daffy Duck to Schwarzenegger’s Bugs Bunny, Sly kept meeting Schwarzenegger’s playground taunts with retaliations as disproportionate as his weird ’80s pecs.
Tri-Star Pictures
![Disclaimer](<a href="https://rebrand.ly/LazadaSalePh"><img src="http://getfreefollowers.net/images/lazhorizontal.jpeg" /></a>){kind=link}
0 Comments