10 Times Hollywood Learned The Wrong Lesson From Movies
5. Rambo Is An Action Hero - First Blood
The original Rambo film, First Blood, is an excellent movie, and while undeniably classified as an action film, it was also a thematically rich character study topped by a terrific central performance from Sylvester Stallone as PTSD-afflicted Vietnam veteran John Rambo.
More to the point, Rambo only causes the death of a single person in the original movie, and it was by accident at that. At this point, it was a stretch to even call him an action hero.
Yet because First Blood cleaned up at the box office - grossing $125 million against a mere $15 million budget - production company Carolco Pictures swiftly greenlit a sequel which threw every shred of complexity out with the bathwater.
Rambo: First Blood Part II may be entertaining schlock to a point, but it's also a festival of carnage that the original never was, with Rambo now reinvented as a righteous merchant of death protecting freedom with a trusty machine-gun. The three other sequels that followed similarly presented a Rambo who was a far cry from his original conception as a war vet simply trying to find his place in the world again.
Collectively the Rambo franchise has grossed over $800 million globally, but it rather lost sight of author David Morrell's original intent about 40 years ago.