They might be the best of friends these days, but at the height of their rivalry, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone would do anything to get under each other’s skin, which extended to the former tricking the latter into starring in one of his worst-ever movies.
Long since named by Stallone as the film he regrets more than any other in his entire career, 1992’s Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot saw him “win” a Golden Raspberry Award for ‘Worst Actor’, and it was entirely deserved. He only signed onto the project in the first place because he heard his arch-nemesis was interested, which inadvertently saw him fall right into Schwarzenegger’s spectacular ruse.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stallone acknowledged that he’d made the film for the express purpose of sticking it to his musclebound foe: “I had heard Schwarzenegger was going to do that movie, and I said, ‘I’m going to beat him to it.’ I think he set me up.”
When pressed for a response on whether the allegations were true, the Terminator star answered in the affirmative: “It’s 100% true. In those days, we did all kinds of crazy things to get ahead in our rivalry,” he said. “Luckily for us and everyone else, today, we root for each other. Thank God, because we sure don’t ever need another Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.”
Elaborating on the lengths he went to simply to see his biggest adversary suffer the ignominy of a critical and commercial failure, Schwarzenegger shared his tactics with Jimmy Kimmel: “I read the script, and it was a piece of shit. Let’s be honest. I say to myself, ‘I’m not going to do this movie.’ Then they went to Sly, and Sly called me, ‘Have they ever talked to you about doing this movie?’” he continued. “And I said, yes, I was thinking about doing it. This is a really brilliant idea, this movie. When he heard that, because he was in competition, he said, ‘Whatever it takes, I’ll do the movie.’ And, of course, the movie went major into the toilet.”
Even though they’ve since let bygones be bygones, the Rocky and Rambo headliner nonetheless continued to seethe when telling Fox & Friends that “Schwarzenegger tricked me to do that piece of junk”. Once he realised it was too late, his mission statement was simple: “I’m going to kill Arnold. I am going to find him and track him.”
Having co-starred in Escape Plan and the first three instalments of The Expendables franchise, the two elder statesmen of action cinema have put their long-running feud to the side, even if Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot lives on as an example of just how far Schwarzenegger was willing to go in order to come out on top.