Sylvester Stallone Superhero Movie Just Got Dealt A Devastating Blow
The upcoming Sylvester Stallone movie has been hit hard this time.
This article is more than 2 years old
If you need to see Sylvester Stallone in a superhero movie that is not DC or Marvel, you will have to wait a bit longer than expected. Samaritan has set August 26, 2022, as its release date.
Samaritan was meant to release this summer. As that ship had sailed, the Sylvester Stallone movie needed to find a new placement. Although filming wrapped in November 2020, the pandemic had made a theatrical release a dangerous move to getting a decent box office return. Some of the year’s biggest releases like Black Widow, The Suicide Squad, and F9 have not performed as well due to COVID-19, so it should be expected at this point that more movies will start setting theatrical dates for late 2022 or beyond.
The story will follow a young boy, played by Javon “Wanna” Walton (Euphoria), who finds evidence that an old superhero who disappeared 20 years ago is still around. He goes to look for the not-so-missing hero, who is played by Sylvester Stallone.
Julius Avery is directing, making this his third feature-length film. 2014’s Son of a Gun was his debut, but 2018’s Overlord brought attention to the filmmaker because of its crazy World War 2 premise. Writing the script for the Sylvester Stallone movie is Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room), who came up with the original concept for Samaritan. Starring with Sylvester Stallone and the young Euphoria actor is quite the cast. The action star will be joined by Dascha Polanco (In the Heights), Martin Starr (Silicon Valley), Pilou Asbæk (Game of Thrones), and Nicholas Logan (I Care a Lot). This will be the second time Asbæk has worked with the director as he starred in Overlord.
Action roles back in the 80s made people like Sylvester Stallone look like a superhero on the big screen before Marvel and DC took the world by storm with the DC Extended Universe and Marvel Cinematic Universe. First Blood and its sequels, and more recently The Expendables franchise, have proven that the actor is a killing machine in Hollywood. Julius Avery spoke to TotalFilm, a sister publication to Game’s Radar, about how exciting it was to work with his childhood hero.
We didn’t really have superheroes. We only had action heroes. And Sly was the closest thing we had to a superhero. So to put him in a superhero movie? That feels fresh and cool and something that people will get a kick out of.
Julius Avery
It is not the first time Sylvester Stallone has played in a superhero movie. He appeared in James Gunn’s (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 for a brief role. For comic book readers, he was spotted as a character who was a Guardian in some iterations of the comic book series. Recently, he teamed back up with Gunn to play supervillain King Shark to act as a hero on a deadly mission for a reduced prison sentence.
While fans of Sylvester Stallone wait for Samaritan, there is more to come from the actor. He recently teased an image for The Expendables 4, making it the first of anything we have heard about the project that has stayed in the shadows for years. The Rocky star is also set to lead the sci-fi movie Little America from Outside the Wire writer Rowan Athale.
