Actor and filmmaker Seth Rogen has blasted Sylvester Stallone’s filmography, arguing that the action icon didn’t make many good films in his career.
Approaching eighty, Sylvester Stallone shows no sign of hanging up his gloves. Between the creation of a mysterious Tarantino‑backed series, producing the new season of Tulsa King, whispers of a fresh entry in the Expendables saga, and a thriller that sits somewhere between Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, the tireless Sly keeps the headlines coming at a breakneck pace.
These projects will sit alongside a monumental career that began in the early 1970s. While the marquee Italian‑born star gave birth to timeless masterpieces, his résumé also carries a few clunkers and some real stinkers. An artistic imbalance that has rubbed the wrong way Seth Rogen (the mischief-maker behind Superbad, This Is the End or the series The Studio), who argues that the “good” filmography of Sly would fit on one hand:
There’s Demolition Man. Tango & Cash is entertaining, but it’s not a good film by any stretch. And honestly, I don’t give a damn about all the Rocky movies.
Echoing the sentiment, host Ike Barinholtz pressed the point, recalling the star’s slump around the turn of the millennium:
Stallone had a slump between 1997 and 2012 that was seriously rough. Remember Driven? Daylight? The guy spends the entire film stuck in the Holland Tunnel—and his character is literally named Kit Latura!
To cap off his demolition of the myth, Rogen offered a blunt comparison with Arnold Schwarzenegger:
Stallone may simply not be as gifted as Schwarzenegger, and by a long shot. A film like Predator alone is vastly superior to anything Stallone has ever shot. Stallone doesn’t have an equivalent to Terminator 2 or True Lies. Schwarzenegger has starred in big films.
If that take is as decisive as it sounds, one notes that Rogen did not list exactly which four films he counts as “the good ones,” which makes his judgment even harsher. Because sweeping aside Rambo: First Blood, the tension of Cliffhanger, or Sly’s masterful turn in Copland still veers into notable oversimplification. In any case, here at Écran Large we opted for a calmer approach and drafted our own top 10 best Sylvester Stallone films to give him his due.
