Sylvester Stallone’s “Judge Dredd” is not remembered as one of the best sci-fi movies ever, to say the least. Lambasted by critics and disliked by audiences, the 1995 film earned a disappointing $113.5 million at the global box office against a $90 million budget and remains conspicuously absent from lists of Stallone’s finest films.
To his credit, Stallone hasn’t attempted to bury his futuristic flop. Instead, he’s been known to discuss the film when the opportunity calls for it. In 2006, the star addressed some of the issues “Judge Dredd” had while answering fan questions for Ain’t It Cool News:
“I think, from what I recall, the whole project was troubled from the beginning. The philosophy of the film was not set in stone – by that I mean ‘Is this going to be a serious drama or with comic overtones’ like other science fiction films that were successful? So a lotta pieces just didn’t fit smoothly. It was sort of like a feathered fish. Some of the design work on it was fantastic and the sets were incredibly real, even standing two feet away, but there was just no communication.”
Stallone was actually just as disappointed in the movie’s failure to capture the atmosphere of the iconic dystopian 2000 AD comic series than the fans. During a 2008 press tour for “Rambo” (via Digital Spy), he outright stated that he considers the movie his worst professional faux pas:
“I think the biggest mistake I ever made was with the sloppy handling of ‘Judge Dredd.’ I thought that could have been a fantastic, nihilistic, interesting vision of the future – judge, jury and executioner. That [film] really bothered me a great deal.”
Stallone considers Judge Dredd a prime example of an ‘inhuman’ movie
Many of Sylvester Stallone’s greatest movies are very character-driven. As such, he has named the Danny Cannon-directed, impersonal “Judge Dredd” as an example of the kind of film that doesn’t represent him at his best. In an interview with Film Threat, he described the experience of disappearing into the industry’s slick machine:
“Toward the end of making ‘Judge Dredd,’ it really had nothing to do with me. It had to do with gimmickry. And that’s fine. There’s certainly a place for that kind of picture. But in those kinds of films, when you see the star in the first few minutes do something that is so extraordinarily inhuman — not possible — you sit back and you look at it the way you’d look at a David Copperfield illusion. At the end of the movie, you don’t walk out saying, ‘I was moved’ or ‘I was sad’ or ‘I cried,’ but ‘How’d they do that?’ You intellectualize but you don’t emotionalize.”
In this 1996 interview, Stallone also admitted that his career between “First Blood” (1982) and “Judge Dredd” veered strongly toward what he considers “gimmickry,” so it’s not like the 1995 sci-fi flop is the only film he files in this folder. Fortunately, his post-1996 CV has brought us plenty of fine movies that put Stallone at the forefront — and in 1993, he even exorcised some of those “Judge Dredd” ghosts when he starred in a considerably more entertaining sci-fi action film, “Demolition Man.”
As for Judge Dredd, the character’s live-action credibility was famously resurrected in 2012 by the Pete Travis-directed, Alex Garland-penned “Dredd,” starring Karl Urban as the titular law enforcer. While far from a box office success, this beloved Urban action movie finally brought honor to the IP.