Rambo creator David Morrell on why the Rambo TV series never happened

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Production on the fifth installment of the RAMBO franchise is currently underway, but before Sylvester Stallone elected to return to the role once again, the future of RAMBO would have been on television. Back in 2015, Fox began development on Rambo: New Blood, a TV series which would have found Stallone taking on a supporting role in the show which would have explored the complex relationship between Rambo and his son, J.R., an ex-Navy SEAL. The project didn't take off, and author David Morrell, who created the Rambo character in his 1972 novel "First Blood," recently spoke with Digital Spy to explain why.

Rambo would be in his early '70s now, as Sylvester is. So you're not going to have a television series with a man of that age as the star. It's just not currently what people watch. So what they were going to do was have Rambo have a child. And this child was in one of the Gulf Wars, and had returned, and now he was coming back from war the way Rambo had come back [from Vietnam]. Never mind that the whole point is that Rambo had been so traumatized by the war that he couldn't bring himself to have a meaningful relationship, let alone have a child. But we'll just forget about all that.

"Basically, [Rambo's son] was going to be someone in civilian life with military skills who did… what? Right wrongs? Was he going to be a version of The Equaliser? I couldn't figure it out," Morrell added. "So to my knowledge, that never went anywhere." That's probably for the best, but even though the RAMBO TV series didn't take off, we still have at least one more blood-soaked adventure on the big-screen to look forward to.

The fifth film, said to be titled RAMBO V: LAST BLOOD, will find Rambo taking on the Mexican drug cartels as he attempts to save the kidnapped daughter of a friend. According to Morrell, there was another idea for a fifth RAMBO movie which he believes would have been an award-winner. During the period in which CREED was in production, Sylvester Stallone phoned Morrell up and said that he wanted to make a "soulful" RAMBO movie. "We spoke for about two hours, on the phone, every weekend, for about eight weeks. We had a story worked out that we were thinking would be the kind of movie that would get positive attention at film festivals; that this would, indeed, be a soulful journey," Morrell said. "It would have action, but it would essentially be about a man who was in war, and was looking back about what it had accomplished." When Stallone announced that he would be retiring from playing Rambo in 2016, that seemingly put an end to the project, so Morrell was a little surprised when a fifth film was eventually announced which was "nothing at all like what he and I discussed."

Sylvester Stallone will next be seen reprising another of his classic characters, Rocky Balboa, in CREED II on November 21st.