An early Rambo 5 script had Sylvester Stallone fight a monster in 2009. Just one year after Rambo’s release, Sylvester Stallone was already working on a fifth movie called Rambo V: The Savage Hunt, where John Rambo, a new companion named Beau Brady, and a team of soldiers faced a genetically engineered being designed to be a perfect killing machine in the Arctic circle (via Ain’t It Cool News). Logically, the only person who can stop the bioengineered abomination would be a similarly unstoppable force, John Rambo himself. With a monster villain and a more claustrophobic setting, Rambo V: The Savage Hunt would have leaned more into the slasher genre than the previous movies’ action extravaganza.
Rambo V: The Savage Hunt would have been a modified adaptation of James Byron Huggins’ 1999 novel Hunter, which had the exact same premise but was led by an expert tracker called Nathaniel Hunter and his wolf Ghost. The project progressed in the development stage with a script, an official title, and Sylvester Stallone attached, but it soon got scrapped in favor of an earlier concept, which dropped Rambo V: The Savage Hunt’s sci-fi inspirations and laid the foundations for the kidnapping storyline that would become Rambo: Last Blood. While Last Blood was certainly more in keeping with the wider Rambo franchise, the sci-fi spin remains a tantalizing missed opportunity.
I’d love to see the story from the book Hunter made into a movie. Obviously, Stallone is well past the age to fulfill the main character’s role; however, no doubt with the right actor the movie would rock!
Take care all –
Rourke
