Shared cinematic universes are all the rage these days in Hollywood. Every studio’s got one or is trying to get one off the ground and it’s not hard to see why. For the most part, they all involve superheroes or some kind of sci-fi/comic book property, but if Kurt Russell had his way, we’d have gotten a much different type of cinematic universe, and a long time before Marvel or DC ever even entertained the idea.
While doing press for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the actor revealed that back in the 1980s, he pitched an idea for a film that would bring together all of the big action movie icons of the time, in hopes of launching some sort of shared universe:
“Years ago I did think that it’d be a good idea, and nobody would listen to me, I thought it’d be great to sort of take a bunch of the characters… guys like Bruce Willis and Stallone and Schwarzenegger and whatever. They all had one best character in the action world… I thought it’d be fun to put those guys together. That would’ve been a realistic version of what Marvel did but it was like talking to a wall… It was a little ahead of its time.”
Russell would have played Snake Plissken, of course, while Stallone would have shown up as Rambo, Willis as John McClane and Arnie as The Terminator (presumably). Sounds like a pretty fun idea, though putting such a thing together would probably have been pretty tough considering how different each character and their respective properties are. Still, if audiences were fine with just throwing all rules and logic out the door, something like this could have been a pretty wild, and mindless, ride.
For now, we’ll have to settle for The Expendables, which is the closest we’ll get to seeing our favorite action heroes from the 80s fighting alongside one another. Then again, we already know that both Escape from New York and The Terminator are being rebooted, and given the path that Hollywood’s headed down, movies like Die Hard and Rambo can’t be too far behind. So perhaps a shared cinematic universe involving our favorite action heroes could one day become a reality?
What do you think? Would you like to see characters such as Snake, John Rambo, John McClane, etc., teaming up to mow down waves of enemies? Sound off in the usual place with your thoughts!
