Sylvester Stallone has always admitted to failures in his career, and this film is one of his biggest failures!
Judge Dredd will soon celebrate 30 years of its release! The feature film with Sylvester Stallone remains relatively unpopular overall, with an average rating of 2.4 out of 5 for more than 4,800 votes! And precisely, the actor-star of the film believes that this film is not at all what he hoped for in 1995.
In February 2008, the interpreter of Rambo and Rocky returned to this great disappointment, which he almost describes as a “monumental error” at the microphone of Digital Spy :
Hollywood Pictures
I think the biggest mistake of my career was the sloppiness with which Judge Dredd was done. I thought it could be a fantastical, nihilistic and interesting vision of the future – judge, jury and executioner. This [film] really bothered me a lot.
Released on August 23, 1995 in France, Judge Dredd is adapted from the eponymous comic book written by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. The story of the film takes place in 2139, after a nuclear apocalypse. The survivors live crowded together in Megacities plagued by crime. But for this, there is a radical remedy: the Judges, who are endowed with the powers of arrest, judgment and execution.
Even if it is not the worst of Stallone’s films, with a budget estimated at 85 or 90 million euros, Judge Dredd only grossed 113.5 million dollars at the box office, a total failure marking the immediate end to what could have been a new franchise led by Stallone and a real stop in his career.
Caused by this public disavowal? The reassessment of the project at the last moment to try to attenuate the violence and the incessant arguments between Stallone and director Danny Cannon over the tone of the film, the first wanting an action comedy and Cannon wanting a dark film sticking to the comics. ‘origin.
Hollywood Pictures
Years later, Sylvester Stallone remains faithful to this position. He declared, still in 2008, to the magazine Uncut :
“[Judge Dredd] is a missed opportunity. Many fans had a problem with Dredd taking off his helmet, something he never does in the comics. But for me, it was mostly a huge waste of the potential of this idea; it’s not at the level of what it should have been, which is probably more comical and humorous.”