Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone rivalry 'out of control'

Arnold Schwarzenegger says his rivalry with Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s into the early 1990s got out of control.

Though the legends are now good friends, there was a natural rivalry between them in the past as they battled for action movie supremacy. While Schwarzenegger starred in such hits as The Terminator, Predator, The Running Man and True Lies, Stallone won an Academy Award for Rocky and also led the Rambo franchise.

Mahjong Scenes in Cinema: What They Reveal About Character and Culture

Thursday 8 January 2026, 08:23

From jump scares to jackpots: why horror movie aesthetics persist in modern online casino design

Tuesday 23 December 2025, 10:29

Arnie regrets the time was lost to the rivalry.

“We were movie rivals, but we took the competitiveness to the extreme – we each had to have the best body, we had to kill more people in our films and we had to have the biggest guns,” Schwarzenegger said on a new episode of The Graham Norton Show.

“It got out of control and we tried to derail each other.

“Then when we both invested in Planet Hollywood, we started flying around the world together to promote it and we became fantastic friends. He is a great human being and we are now inseparable.”

Arnie and Sly would go on to star alongside each other in The Expendables franchise as well as The Escape Plan.

Arnie TRICKED Stallone into taking a role

They regularly attempted to beat each other to roles, too, and Stallone recently claimed that Schwarzenegger pretended to be interested in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot so that the former took the job.

“I had heard Schwarzenegger was going to do that movie and I said, ‘I’m going to beat him to it’,” he told the New York Post.

“I think he set me up.

“Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was supposed to be like ‘Throw Momma From the Train’ with the mom as this really nasty piece of work. Instead, you hire the nicest woman in Hollywood, Estelle Getty, who you wish was your mother. That’s the end of that!”

When the New York Post contacted Schwarzenegger to ask if he deliberately feigned interest in the movie in the hope that Stallone would star in it, he confessed:

“It’s 100 percent true. In those days we did all kinds of crazy things to get ahead in our rivalry. Luckily for us and everyone else, today, we root for each other. Thank God, because we sure don’t ever need another Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.”