Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren making TV pilot that's somehow not a wacky buddy sitcom
Aux Features TV
Look, just bear with us for a second here. Pretend, for a moment, that you were Dolph Lundgren or Sylvester Stallone. (We’ll give you a minute to get your bearings. Damn, you’re big!) Now, imagine that you were invited to make a TV pilot alongside your old pal Dolph/Sylvester (whichever one you aren’t for the purpose of this delightful hypothetical), tapping into your decades-long associations with each other, including roles in Rocky IV, Creed 2, and the Expendables movies. Now, given infinite time and resources, would you choose to make that project another probably super-grim hour-long action series where one of you plays a super spy martial arts expert soldiers of fortune who’s unflappable in the face of international terror? Or would you make it a wacky multi-cam sitcom, all about whatever the fuck Dolph Lundgren and Sylvester Stallone actually fucking talk about whenever they move within each other’s naturally massive orbits?
Sadly, reality failed to take our notes yet again today, as Variety reports that Lundgren and Stallone are coming together on a project called The International, in which Lundgren will star as some kind of negotiator/spy character who probably never even asks people how much they bench. Stallone, meanwhile, won’t even appear; he’ll instead be serving as a producer and director on the show, and not as the Kramer-esque neighbor constantly barging in to ask if her can borrow some free weights from his buddy Dolph. (In our conception of this series, it’s pretty much all weightlifting stuff.) CBS has given a put-pilot order to The International, which is being written and produced by Numb3rs producer Ken Sanzel.
14 Comments
Thundergun!
While an Odd Couple reboot seems like the obvious choice, I’d like to up that ante and suggest calling up Carl Weathers and Jackie Chan for a full Golden Guys series.For added complexity, no one gets to play an aging bodybuilder, boxer, or action star. We’re done with that meta shit where celebs play slightly renamed versions of themselves (looking at you, Roseanne, Jerry, and Tim!).They have to play retired something elses that for whatever zany reason, have decided to share a living space. Maybe one is broker who lost his nest egg in a bad stock deal. One could be a writer who never hit it big. Another could be a smooth-talking salesman who’s always on the verge of the next big deal. Another could be an ex-factory line worker. Lots of possibilities out there! Lots of potential for a short series that’s just as much of this as you can take.
Dolph as a former trophy husband to a wealthy woman, but now that she’s dead (or divorced), he’s having to rent out rooms in his house to make ends meet. It was either that or get a real job. Basically, the Blanche role.Stallone can be the former factory worker living off his pension that may not survive much longer if the rich people that run it have their way. Give him some sort of part time job to supplement it.Make Carl Weathers the slick saleman, who likes to gamble just a little too much. That way he can be really successful professionally, but also explain why he’s living with a bunch of other dudes and alienated his wife and kids long ago.Jackie Chan can be a writer suffering writer’s block and having to work as an adjunct professor at some third rate school for peanuts. He can teach English (or whatever his specialty was that he was writing about) while also picking up a class teaching Chinese (or ESL) if it fits his schedule.
Netflix talk to ODB now and commission this!!
Oh my god I’d be sooo in for this.
The Odd Couple? The difference between the two would be… height and accent?
And intelligence (or at least education). Dolph has a master’s in chemical engineering.
So that means that Dolph is singing, dancing, playing drums and breaking blocks of ice, right?
Oh. Yeah. I will never see a second of this, except maybe in gif form.
You will when you get taken down to the re-education centre and they prop your eyes open for 48 hours straight.You’ll come out changed. You’ll think you’re happy. But whenever anyone asks you “Hey, do you like Dolph Lundgren?” You smile and say “He’s a fine actor” and you’ll realise that tears are streaming down your face over your rictus grin.
Sly should hire William Hughes to write and also cast him as the exasperated next door neighbor to these musclebound lugs.
I was terribly confused until I realised that this article was written by William Hughes and you weren’t suggesting the dead boxer for the role.
LOL, sorry. That would add an interesting dynamic!
If I remember correctly, The International was a Clive Owen movie about… Well, here’s the trailer: It’s like that, but waaaaaaaay longer and not as exciting, but super tense all the time.