Sylvester Stallone recently made the news by revealing that he was interested in reviving his character John Rambo in a prequel movie, playing him as a teenage soldier in the Vietnam War. Speaking to Screen Rant and to The Playlist’s Bingeworthy podcast, Stallone said he’d pitched a prequel project that would re-imagine Rambo’s history in the war, using AI de-aging technology so that the 79-year-old actor could play the 18-year-old character. “It isn’t a big stretch,” he told The Playlist.
Finnish director Jalmari Helander — who’s set to direct the prequel John Rambo for Millennium Media — disagrees. “I’m not sure the technology is there yet to pull that off,” he tells Polygon out of the 2025 Fantastic Fest film festival. Helander was on the ground in Austin, Texas in support of his upcoming action movie, Sisu: Road to Revenge, which opens theatrically on Nov. 21.
Road to Revenge, a sequel to Helander’s much-admired, brutally simple Sisu, has a fair bit of Rambo in its DNA. The 2022 original and its sequel both star Jorma Tommila as Aatami Korpi, a grizzled Finnish Army veteran who slaughters his way through squad after squad of enemy soldiers (Nazis in the first movie, Red Army occupiers in the second) after they take something precious from him. Like John Rambo in his debut movie, 1982’s First Blood, Aatami is dogged, ruthless, resourceful, and extremely skilled at killing people. And like the First Blood version of Rambo, he seems like a peaceful man who only becomes an unstoppable murder-machine when outside forces push him in that direction.
Helander is open about looking to Rambo as an inspiration for the Sisu movies, and wanting a chance to take on the character himself. But he’d prefer to do it with less CG involvement. “Of course when it’s totally impossible to do something practical, you need to go CG,” he said. “But I like to do as much as possible practically.”
Sisu: Road to Revenge includes some obvious CG stunts, like a show-stopping moment where Aatami uses explosives to send a tank flying through the air. “[A movie] has to be entertaining,” Helander said. “I think the reason to go to a cinema is to see something you haven’t seen before, and be free of all kinds of rules and laws — especially laws of physics.”
But he says his prequel John Rambo, which has The Recruit star Noah Centineo booked for the title role, will probably be more restrained. “I’m pretty sure I’m not going that crazy in Rambo,” he said. “It might be a bit weird — we’ll see. I have to find a new way to approach [the action in this movie]. What’s my Rambo movie going to look like? I don’t even know myself yet. It’s something that will happen when I’m shooting.”
Helander says that even though he found inspiration in the Rambo movies, he only recently felt it would be possible to take on one himself. “I was asked many times, do I want to do Rambo?” he said. “And I always said no. But then we had the idea of actually doing the origin story. That made me realize that I could actually do it, that I have a way in. I’m always talking about Rambo. It’s weird that I’m going to do a Rambo film now.”
If his plan for the film is still that open-ended, would he be open to working with Stallone on John Rambo, or incorporating him into the movie in some way? “I have an — I know what’s going to happen, but I can’t talk about it,” he says. “I would like to do something with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I might do that. I have an idea.”