Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone have always been in competition with each other, something both action heroes will openly admit to. However, when working on the 2013 prison-set action thriller Escape Plan , it seems they competed with each other in a whole new way when starring alongside each other.
The friendly rivalry between Schwarzenegger and Stallone is the stuff of movie legend, with one particular incident leading to the former tricking the latter to sign up to star in the terrible Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. However, as director Mikael Håfström explained while promoting his new movie, Slingshot, when working with the pair, they were incredibly “sweet” when it came to one particular competition between them.
Speaking to ComicBook, Håfström said:
“They were like kids on a summer camp. They were so sweet. They came to set wondering, ‘What are we going to do today? Where do you want us to be?’ Both of them tried to be the nicest guy on the set. I’m not saying it to be polite or just saying everything was great. It’s hard work making a movie. But that was a really joyful movie to make with those two guys. They couldn’t be more professional or show more respect for the process.”
Escape Plan Did Not Set the World Alight, but Still Produced a Franchise
Despite being two of the biggest action movie stars of the 1980s, Schwarzenegger and Stallone never appeared on screen together during the years that produced some of their greatest shows of masculinity. When they appeared together in Escape Plan, a few years after their collaboration on The Expendables franchise, it was not a complete success with either audiences or critics.
Despite the idea of the pair once again sharing screentime being an exciting prospect for fans, Escape Plan scored 50% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer, which placed it in between the respective 46% and 67% received by The Expendables and The Expendables 2. Like many of their other movies of the last two decades, as far as most critics were concerned, Escape Plan was a tried and tested formula movie, that took all the best clichés of the past and rolled them into a testosterone-fueled imitation of their former glory.
However, the pairing of two action gods – even aging ones – proved to be a box office winner on a worldwide level despite its underperformance in the U.S. Escape Plan almost tripled its $50 million budget, taking $137 million, enough to see Stallone carry on for two further Escape Plan movies in 2018 and 2019. Schwarzenegger did not return for the sequels, but wrestler-turned-movie star Dave Bautista stepped into the void for both straight-to-video releases.
Escape Plan
is currently available to stream on Netflix.
