Rambo (franchise)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Rambo franchise has earned $819 million at the box office across five films, even though critics were divided about the series. Its hero is John J. Rambo, a United States Army Special Forces veteran played by Sylvester Stallone. The Vietnam War traumatized him, yet it also gave him superior military skills. Over the course of the series he turns those skills on corrupt police officers, enemy troops and drug cartels.

  How does a damaged veteran become the center of such a long-running series? What turned one man's private war into cartoons, toys, trading cards, comics and video games? And why are people still planning his next chapter, long after the last film?

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• 2. A Drifter Comes to Town

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  In December 1981, a wandering veteran named John Rambo reaches a small town in rural Washington, searching for a fellow Green Beret. He learns that his friend died of cancer the previous summer, a result of exposure to Agent Orange. Since coming home from Vietnam, Rambo has drifted across the country for almost a decade, unable to settle into civilian life.

  Sheriff Will Teasle, played by Brian Dennehy, presumes that Rambo is just another drifter. Rambo ignores an order to stay away from town. He is charged with vagrancy and then suffers harassment and brutality from the sheriff's deputies.

  The brutality triggers flashbacks to the torture he endured as a prisoner of war held by the North Vietnamese. Rambo fights his way out of the sheriff's department with his field knife and escapes into the wilderness. A manhunt follows, and the sheriff and his deputies all end up badly wounded. Rambo throws a rock at a helicopter in self-defense, the pilot loses control and an officer falls out. The State Police and the National Guard are called in.

  Colonel Samuel Trautman, played by Richard Crenna, arrives next. He was Rambo's former commanding officer, and he urges patience. His idea is to let Rambo slip away, so that he has time to calm down and can be arrested without incident. Teasle allows Trautman to reach Rambo through a stolen police radio, but Rambo refuses to surrender.

  The authorities reject Trautman's advice and keep hunting. Rambo answers by returning to town with guns and bombs taken from a commandeered Army truck. The assault destroys the sheriff's office and more of the main street. Rambo stands ready to eliminate the sheriff when Trautman confronts him face to face and persuades his former soldier to surrender.

  Behind the film sits a 1972 novel, also titled First Blood, by David Morrell. Ted Kotcheff directed the adaptation, which reached American audiences in 1982. Trautman had talked Rambo down, but the colonel would return in the next film with a very different offer.

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• 3. Cold War Rescues

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  Between the first two films, Rambo is convicted and sent to a civilian maximum-security prison where hard labor is the norm. Oddly, the rigid routine gives him some much-needed stability, because it recalls the military hierarchy he once knew.

  Rambo: First Blood Part II, released in 1985, opens with Trautman offering him freedom. The price is a return to Vietnam to search for American prisoners of war still held in captivity. Marshall Murdock, played by Charles Napier, runs the mission and is portrayed as a corrupt political figure who wants the truth buried. Rambo's orders are only to photograph a North Vietnamese camp, the very camp where he was once held, so the public will believe no prisoners remain. Murdock knows otherwise.

  A malfunction as Rambo leaves the plane forces him to cut away much of his equipment before he reaches the jungle. His contact there is Co Bao, played by Julia Nickson, an anti-communist Vietnamese rebel working as an intelligence agent. Rambo finds prisoners at the camp and frees one of them. At the helicopter pickup, however, Murdock orders him abandoned, and Rambo and the prisoner are recaptured.

  Rambo is immobilized in a pit of sewage and leeches, then tortured by Soviet soldiers who are training Vietnamese troops. Co slips into the base in the guise of a prostitute and helps him escape. The two share a kiss, and then Co is shot by surprise gunfire. Enraged, Rambo begins a one-man war, steals a captured Soviet helicopter and destroys the camp. He frees all the prisoners and brings down a pursuing Soviet Mi-24 Hind with an RPG.

  At the American base in Thailand, Rambo grabs an M-60 machine gun and wrecks the electronic equipment in the headquarters building. He tells Murdock to be honest with the public about the prisoners or face a return visit. When Trautman says Rambo will be honored once again, Rambo declines, saying the prisoners deserve the credit more. He receives a presidential pardon and decides to stay in Thailand.

  By 1988, in Rambo III, he is helping to build a temple there. Trautman watches him win a stick-fighting match, then asks him to join a mission to Afghanistan. The plan is to supply weapons, including FIM-92 Stinger missiles, to the Mujahideen, Afghan fighters resisting the Soviets. Rambo refuses, even after being shown photographs of civilians suffering under Soviet rule, so Trautman goes alone.

  Soviet troops ambush Trautman's party in the mountains at night. At a Soviet base, Colonel Alexei Zaysen, played by Marc de Jonge, and his henchman Kourov, played by Randy Raney, torture Trautman for information. Embassy field officer Robert Griggs, played by Kurtwood Smith, tells Rambo what happened. Rambo flies to Pakistan and meets Mousa, a weapons supplier played by Sasson Gabai.

  Mousa agrees to take Rambo to a village in the Afghan desert, close to the Soviet base. The villagers hesitate to help, and Soviet helicopters attack the village after one of Mousa's shop assistants tells the Russians about Rambo. With only Mousa and a young boy named Hamid, played by Doudi Shoua, Rambo reaches the base. His first attempt fails, and Hamid is shot in the leg.

  The next day Rambo returns just in time to save Trautman from being tortured with a flamethrower. They flee in a stolen helicopter that crashes, and they continue on foot. Zaysen then confronts them with an army of Soviet tanks. The Mujahideen, together with Mousa and Hamid, ride onto the battlefield in a cavalry charge. Rambo kills Zaysen by driving a tank into the helicopter carrying him.

  Rambo and Trautman say goodbye to their Afghan allies and head home. After they left Afghanistan, Rambo would not appear in a new film until 2008.

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• 4. Late Chapters

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  Footage of a crisis in Burma, also known as Myanmar, opens the 2008 film Rambo. Than Shwe rules the country with an iron fist, and the army takes harsher stances against the pro-democracy movement. Rebels are thrown into a mine-infested marsh and gunned down by an army unit overseen by Major Pa Tee Tint.

  Rambo now lives in a village in Thailand near the Burmese border, where he earns a living by capturing snakes and selling them. A missionary named Michael Burnett, played by Paul Schulze, asks him to take his group down the Salween River to help the Karen people. Rambo refuses until Sarah Miller, played by Julie Benz, another missionary in the group, changes his mind.

  Pirates stop the boat and demand Sarah as the price of passage. Rambo takes advantage of their complacency and kills them all. The act saves the missionaries, but it greatly disturbs them. Later the Burmese army attacks the village, killing most of the villagers and two missionaries and capturing the rest. When ten days pass with no word, their pastor, Arthur Marsh, played by Ken Howard, asks Rambo to guide hired mercenaries to the village.

  Troubled by what might have happened to Sarah, Rambo goes along. At the destroyed village, they see soldiers forcing survivors to run through a minefield. The mercenaries hesitate, but Rambo shoots the soldiers with a bow and arrow. The team hijacks a truck and plans to free the hostages from the camp within fifteen minutes, to avoid alerting the army.

  A massive manhunt follows. Only Rambo, Sarah and the team's sniper, called School Boy and played by Matthew Marsden, escape capture. Just as the others are about to be executed, Rambo takes a truck-mounted .50-caliber machine gun and opens fire. Karen rebels join the fight, and Major Tint tries to flee, only to run into Rambo's machete.

  Encouraged by Sarah's words, Rambo returns to the United States. The final scene shows him walking along a rural highway, past a horse farm and a rusted mailbox marked with the name R. Rambo. He heads down the gravel driveway as the credits roll.

  Eleven years later, in Rambo: Last Blood, John Rambo lives in Bowie, Arizona, on his late father's horse ranch. He manages it with an old friend, Maria Beltran, and her granddaughter Gabriela. Rambo and Maria both tell Gabriela not to go to Mexico, but she secretly drives there to ask her biological father, Miguel, why he abandoned her and her mother. He coldly tells her that he never really cared for either of them.

  A friend named Gizelle takes the heartbroken Gabriela to a club, where enforcers of a Mexican cartel drug and kidnap her. Rambo rushes to Mexico, questions Miguel and Gizelle, and follows the trail to the club. There the cartel, led by the brothers Hugo and Victor Martinez, beats and marks him. They take his driver's license, which shows the location of his ranch, along with a photo of Gabriela.

  A woman named Carmen Delgado, played by Paz Vega, has been tailing Rambo. She is an independent journalist who has been investigating the Martinez brothers, who kidnapped and murdered her sister. She takes Rambo to her home and cares for him until he recovers after four days. Rambo then raids a brothel and finds a drugged Gabriela, but she dies on the drive home from a forced overdose.

  Rambo sends Maria away and rigs the ranch with traps. He returns to Mexico and persuades Carmen to help him find Victor by appealing to her grief and frustration. Rambo kills Victor, and in retaliation Hugo leads a train of 7 SUVs filled with hitmen to the ranch. Each of them falls victim to the traps, and Rambo saves Hugo for last and kills him.

  Weakened, Rambo sits on the porch of his father's house and vows to keep fighting and keep the memories of his loved ones alive. During the credits, flashbacks to scenes from the first four films play. Rambo finally saddles up his horse and rides off into the sunset.

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• 5. Behind the Camera

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  Sylvester Stallone co-wrote the screenplays for all five films, and in 2008 he also took the director's chair for the fourth. The other four films went to four different directors: Ted Kotcheff, George P. Cosmatos, Peter MacDonald and Adrian Grünberg.

  James Cameron shares the screenplay credit with Stallone on the second film, with Kevin Jarre credited for the story. The first film's screenplay credit goes to Michael Kozoll, William Sackheim and Stallone. Sheldon Lettich co-wrote the third film with him. Art Monterastelli co-wrote the fourth, and Matthew Cirulnick co-wrote the fifth. Dan Gordon and Stallone share the story credit on that last film.

  Jerry Goldsmith composed and conducted the scores for the first three films. The National Philharmonic Orchestra performed the music for the first two, and the Hungarian State Opera Orchestra performed the third. His main theme for Rambo became the basis for the end title song "It's a Long Road," performed by Dan Hill, on the First Blood soundtrack. Brian Tyler scored the 2008 film and Last Blood.

  Carolco Pictures is listed among the production companies for the first three films. Orion Pictures distributed the first, TriStar Pictures the second, and Lionsgate the later ones. Today Lionsgate offers all five through an output deal with StudioCanal, the company that holds the underlying rights to the first three. Paramount Pictures holds the television rights to those same three.

  The first collection of films on home video was a DVD set released on the 24th of July 2001. A Blu-ray collecting all five films finally appeared on the 11th of February 2020.

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• 6. Numbers and Verdicts

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  First Blood cost $15 million to make and took in $125,212,904 worldwide, with $47,212,904 of that from the United States. It also earned the best reviews of the series, with 86% on Rotten Tomatoes from 49 reviews and a Metacritic score of 61 from 15 reviews.

  The second film cost $25 million and grossed $300,400,432 worldwide. Critics were far cooler on it, giving it 33% on Rotten Tomatoes from 45 reviews and 47 on Metacritic. The most profitable film in the series was among its worst reviewed.

  Rambo III carried a budget of $58 million, the largest of the five, and earned $189,015,611 worldwide. It scored 39% on Rotten Tomatoes from 38 reviews and 36 on Metacritic. The 2008 film cost $50 million and grossed $113,244,290. Critics gave it 38% from 150 reviews and 46 on Metacritic from 26 reviews.

  Rambo: Last Blood, released on the 20th of September 2019, also cost $50 million. It grossed $91,490,353 worldwide and drew the lowest scores of the series, 26% from 174 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and 26 on Metacritic from 31 reviews.

  Added together, the five budgets come to $198 million. The United States supplied $338,906,479 of the total gross, while international audiences supplied $480,446,186. A year after the second film arrived, an animated Rambo was already in broadcast syndication.

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• 7. Beyond the Screen

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  On the 15th of September 1986, the animated series Rambo: The Force of Freedom began its run in broadcast syndication. Ruby-Spears produced it, and 65 episodes aired before the last one on the 26th of December 1986. In it, Rambo leads a team called the Force of Freedom against an evil organization named S.A.V.A.G.E., short for Specialist-Administrators of Vengeance, Anarchy and Global Extortion. Neil Ross voiced Rambo, and the show spawned a line of toys.

  Rambo action figures have come from numerous manufacturers, most prominently Coleco and NECA. Stallone has vehemently objected to marketing the franchise to children. Because of that, manufacturers could not license his likeness, apart from one figure in the adult-targeted Sylvester Stallone Legacy Collection. The other figures were designed not to resemble him too closely.

  In 1985, Topps released a 66-card set with images from Rambo: First Blood Part II on the front and plot synopses on the back. Each pack held a sticker from a set of 22 that assembled into a puzzle of Rambo holding a machine gun. For its 75th anniversary in 2013, Topps issued autographed cards from various sets, including this one. The most common autograph is by Julia Nickson, and the least common is by Stallone.

  David Morrell, who wrote the original First Blood novel, also wrote novelizations of the first two sequels. He wanted to add characterization that the films lacked. He wrote none for the 2008 film because its characterization already matched the one in his novel.

  Comics inspired by Rambo appeared in 1986 in two countries. Pocketkomix, a Vietnamese publisher, issued Rambo: Vietnam Hero. In Italy, Giorgio Pedrazzi published a series called Rambo Adventures. Blackthorne Publishing adapted Rambo III in 1988, with story by Bruce Jones and pencils by Charlie Baldorado. In 1989 came an original Blackthorne story by Ron Fortier, with art by Aaron Lopresti and Donnie Jupiter.

  In November 2022, an Indiegogo campaign launched for First Kill, a graphic novel about Rambo's first tour of duty in Vietnam. Stallone and Chuck Dixon wrote it.

  The first Rambo video game arrived in 1985 for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64, based on the second film. A Master System game followed in 1986, and an NES game in 1987. In 1989, Rambo III inspired a crop of games for systems including the Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS and Mega Drive/Genesis, plus a separate arcade game with the same title. In 2008, Sega released a two-player light gun shooter in arcades. Rambo: The Video Game, based on the first three films, came out in 2014 for Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

  Rambo has also wandered into other companies' games. He is a downloadable playable character in Mortal Kombat 11, where Stallone reprised the role. In his arcade ending, Rambo defeats Kronika and considers using her hourglass to right every wrong in history. Choosing who lives and who dies would "kill his soul," so he walks away, saying "After all I've been through, I've earned a little peace."

  Rambo is also an unlockable character in Broforce and in Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff. Call of Duty Warzone, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Call of Duty: Mobile featured him as time-limited downloadable content. Rogue Company offers him as a skin for the character Seeker, and Decipher, Inc. includes him in its trading card game Fight Klub.

  Among the Kamula of Wawoi Falls, in Western Province, Papua New Guinea, Rambo was very popular in the late 1990s. His figure was imported into local legends.

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• 8. Unfinished Business

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  In June 2019 at Cannes, Stallone said he would keep playing John Rambo if the fifth film succeeded. Adrian Grünberg disagreed, saying Last Blood "closes the circle" and ends the film series. In September 2019, Stallone voiced interest in a sixth film. In it, Rambo would return to the Native American reservation where he had grown up.

  In May 2025, it was announced that Millennium Media was producing a prequel to First Blood titled John Rambo. Jalmari Helander, known for the 2022 film Sisu, is attached to direct, and Stallone is not expected to be involved. Helander said: "I have been the biggest fan of Rambo since the age of 11." In August 2025, Noah Centineo was cast as John Rambo.

  Stallone had considered playing the young Rambo himself, using AI to transform into the role. He pictured a Rambo who was the nicest guy in school, a valedictorian and prom king. That Rambo goes to Vietnam expecting a three-week hit-and-run, and the war then turns him into the man audiences know. Stallone said they waited too long on the idea, and he wished the production good luck.

  In November 2025, Lionsgate acquired global distribution rights to the film. Angela Russo-Otstot and Michael Disco will produce for AGBO, with the Russo brothers as executive producers. Kevin King Templeton, Les Weldon and Jonathan Yunger produce for Millennium Media. Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani wrote the screenplay.

  Television has been a longer struggle. In August 2013, a Rambo television series was announced as being in development, with Avi Lerner and Stallone involved. By December 2015, Fox had ordered it as Rambo: New Blood, written by Jeb Stuart. It would center on Rambo and his estranged son J.R., an ex-Navy SEAL. Later that month, Stallone said he would pass on reprising his role.

  By October 2016, the project was repurposed as a reboot film with the same title. Ariel Vromen joined as director, with a script by Brooks McLaren. It never materialized, in favor of Last Blood. In November 2018, Morrell revealed that Stallone had commissioned him to write the series script. Morrell said creatives had a difficult time understanding the story, comparing the son to The Equalizer.

  In September 2019, Stallone described a prequel that would explore who Rambo was before the war: "the perfect guy," a Jim Thorpe-type super athlete and popular kid at school. In November 2021, Jeffrey Greenstein, head of Millennium Media, said the studio was once again developing a Rambo television series. By November 2022, Stallone wanted the series to resemble a Vietnam documentary about how war changes a person. He suggested it might end in modern times, where Rambo "passes the torch."

  India has its own stalled version. In May 2013, Original Entertainment confirmed a five-picture deal with Millennium Films for Bollywood remakes, including First Blood. In early 2016, Siddharth Anand was announced as director. The remake would follow the last member of an elite unit in the Indian Armed Forces who returns home to find a different war waiting.

  In May 2017, Tiger Shroff was cast in the role. By October 2017, the project was on hold while Shroff and Anand completed other work. A release was scheduled for October 2020, with Shroff expected to star in Hindi remakes of all five films. The COVID-19 pandemic delayed it, Rohit Dhawan is slated to direct, and the release date is unknown.

  The prequel is set during the Vietnam War, with production anticipated to begin in early 2026 and a release listed for 2027. It will be filmed in Thailand, the country where the older Rambo of the sequels chose to stay.

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