Lionsgate
In the ’80s and ’90s, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were engaged in an ongoing battle to become the number one action star in America. On the one hand you had Stallone, who, after catapulting himself to stardom with 1976’s “Rocky,” maintained his standing as an A-lister by becoming the archetypal action hero in the “Rambo” saga. That franchise began in 1982 with a somewhat grounded character study of a Vietnam vet haunted by his experiences overseas before transmogrifying into the epitome of the ’80s macho-fests we now associate with the decade. Meanwhile, despite thinking James Cameron’s “Terminator” script had no potential, Schwarzenegger agreed to star in the 1984 low-budget sci-fi slasher, immediately becoming a star as a result. He then fronted some of the most beloved action movies of the ’80s and ’90s, and all the while he and Sly were taking some pretty overt jabs at one another. As Schwarzenegger put it during a Fantastic Fest Q&A, “It was a competition of who had the biggest gun, and then who uses the biggest knife. […] Who has the most unique killings? Who kills more people on screen? Who makes more money at the box office?”
The rivalry was much more than a friendly feud, too, with each actor trying to derail the other’s career for years. One of the greatest moments in this ongoing battle was when Schwarzenegger tricked Stallone into starring in the flop that was 1992’s “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.” A year after the Austrian Oak had starred in one of the greatest action movies ever made with “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” his rival was fronting a limp action comedy that became a box office disaster.
At the time, the idea of a film starring these two juggernauts of action cinema was laughable at best. Which is why it was kind of a big deal to see the pair fronting a prison break action thriller in 2013. At least, it would have been a big deal had the Hollywood veterans still been at the height of their careers. As it transpired, 2013’s “Escape Plan” sort of came and went without much fanfare. As such, the anticlimactic team-up remains somewhat of a curio in the stars’ long shared history, especially since it spawned two direct-to-video follow-ups that were even worse than the original.
Escape Plan was a moderate success
Lionsgate
By the 2000s, both Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger had reached simultaneous nadirs in their careers. Arnie was trying to recapture his glory years with 2000’s lackluster sci-fi flop “The 6th Day” (at least he was paid $25 million for the effort) and Sly was as close to washed up as he’d ever been, struggling to get any studio to back his Rocky comeback movie (which would eventually happen in 2006 as “Rocky Balboa,” the film that saved the “Rocky” franchise).
This is where things got really interesting, because after “Rocky Balboa,” Stallone found himself with some newfound prestige, which he parlayed into the “Expendables” films — a series that paid loving homage to the over-the-top action-fests to which Stallone and his longtime rival were so integral. By this point, the pair had seemingly patched things up, with Arnie appearing in all three movies in the franchise. Then, what had been unthinkable during the height of the pair’s rivalry suddenly became a reality with “Escape Plan,” a 2013 prison break action thriller that saw Stallone and Schwarzenegger co-starring. While the duo had technically co-starred in two “Expendables” movies, those projects featured the two actors as parts of a larger ensemble. “Escape Plan,” however, was a true Stallone/Schwarzenegger team-up.
The film saw Sly play Ray Breslin, a security analyst who has an unorthodox approach to his work in that he places himself inside high-security prisons and tries to break out in order to pinpoint their security weaknesses. After he winds up actually incarcerated in the world’s most secure prison, known only as “The Tomb,” he has to use his professional skills to actually break himself out of confinement. He then befriends fellow inmate, Emil Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger), who’s more than happy to help Breslin on his mission.
Directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, “Escape Plan” only just avoided being a complete flop thanks to the international box office, which propelled the movie to a $103 million global take. Critics were, at best, lukewarm on the project, however, which currently bears a devastatingly average 50% score on Rotten Tomatoes. You’d think that with some dodgy box office numbers and a less than impressive critical response, Stallone and Schwarzenegger would leave it there. Well, the latter did. The former? Well, he drove this thing into the ground.
Escape Plan B (and C)
Lionsgate
If “Escape Plan,” which featured the might of screen legend Arnold Schwarzenegger, was Sylvester Stallone’s plan A, so to speak, then 2018’s “Escape Plan 2: Hades” felt very much like a plan B. That is to say that if the first movie featuring Sly’s former rival didn’t lend the project some historic movie star team-up heft, then the ever-persistent Stallone would probably have made “Escape Plan 2,” which instead of Arnie co-starred Dave Bautista and 50 Cent.
Clearly distributor Lionsgate knew that 2013’s “Escape Plan” did not make enough to warrant another theatrical release in the United States, so the sequel “Hades” went direct-to-video here and got a small release internationally. As you might expect, the film wasn’t good. In fact, it’s one of Stallone’s lowest-rated movies on Rotten Tomatoes, and he’s got some stinkers on there (this is the man who brought us “Judge Dredd,” the stupidest science fiction movie to predict our terrifying present). A lowly 7% RT score is surely not what Sly was hoping for, and despite Bautista charting a much more impressive course in the years since, he couldn’t do much to rescue this follow-up from itself.
Not that it matters when you’ve got critics calling a film “utterly nonsensical and incomprehensible,” but the sequel saw Ray Breslin and his team of security specialists rescue their associate, Shu Ren (Huang Xiaoming), from a supposedly inescapable prison. Such a narrative not only made for some truly rotten reviews, it resulted in a $16.6 million box office take from a limited international theatrical run, and a reported $4.2 million take in the domestic home market — just about enough to make back its budget of $20 million.
Surely, then, this was the movie to break Stallone out of his own prison of churning out abject DTV actioners? Nope. There’s a third movie: “Escape Plan: The Extractors.” It might surprise you to learn that this one actually fared better critically than “Hades.” Still, “The Extractors” tried its best to be a worse movie than its predecessor, with NPR’s Tim Cogshell dubbing the film “terrible” and surmising that its sole reason for existence was “the Hong Kong [movie] market.” That might provide some insight into why Sly and Dave Bautista would agree to these films. After the first one was carried by its international box office, it seems Lionsgate and the stars were eager to try to appeal to that market going forward. Nobody in U.S. theaters would see it, and that was probably for the best. Meanwhile, global audiences very much would see the movie and provide Sly and co. with a decent enough payday.
If you do fancy taking a trip through Sly’s prison break thriller trilogy, /Film has already broken down the correct order to watch the “Escape Plan” movies.
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