Determined to let Schwarzenegger eat his… dust, Stallone accepted the role and fell into the pit that “Arnie” had opened for him.
THE Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone today they are probably friends, but for much of the 1980s they had intense competition and lycophilia. With their “muscles” both were the top stars of Hollywood action movies, and the competition between them was so intense that – in their prime – they never starred in the same movie together.
Their rivalry became so intense that Schwarzenegger once tricked Stallone into making one of the…worst movies ever made Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (the title in Greece was Mom’s Cop with co-starring the sweet Estelle Getty) which fatally “sunk” at the box office.
In the late 80s, ‘Arnie’ was looking to move his career beyond action movies and diversify his roles.
“Hollywood knew that I wanted to get away from just doing action movies that I wanted to do comedies,” Schwarzenegger said on his show Jimmy Kimmel. “So that’s why I did The Twins, Kindergarten Cop and other movies like that.”
Although Schwarzenegger didn’t want to be confined to just action movies, he wasn’t stupid. He knew how to spot a bad script, and he turned down a terrible role.
“So they came to me with this film… Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot,” Schwarzenegger said. “And so I read the script and it was a… let’s be honest. And so I said to myself: ‘I’m not going to make this movie.'”
Although he himself was horrified by the role that was offered to him and was quick to turn it down, he was smart enough to trick Stallone into accepting it, knowing that the film would be very bad.
“Well, then they went to ‘Sly,’ and then Sly called me and said, ‘Hey, have you ever been told about this movie?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I was thinking about doing that’ really great idea, this movie(!)'”
Determined to leave Schwarzenegger to eat his… dust, Stallone accepted the role and fell into the pit opened for him by “Arnie”.
“When he heard that, because he was in a competitive mindset, he immediately called them and said, ‘Look, I’ll do whatever it takes, I’m making the movie,'” Schwarzenegger said. “That’s how he made the film. And of course, the film went straight to the toilet,” the Austrian-American actor said with a chuckle.
Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was indeed a big commercial failure, and has only a 7% positive vote on the film review platform Rotten Tomatoes…
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