Sylvester Stallonehas seen many of his old franchises being revived for new audiences, and following in the footsteps of Rocky and Rambo, it looks likeCliffhangeris going to be another blast from the past for Stallone fans. It is 30 years since Stallone’s Gabriel Walker was caught up with international thieves on the slopes of a mountainside, and in that time there has been a great shift in what audiences expect from an action movie. While discussing his new movieKandahar, directorRic Roman Waughbroke down the new challenges that theCliffhanger sequelwill bring, and how enhancements in technology will make the new movie a much more thrilling experience. He toldCollider:
“What Sly and I talked about, and he was the first one to bring it up, is the challenges of what was made in 1993 with the technology of then, our technology now, we’re gonna take it to a whole other level. Not only visually what we’re gonna do, but sonically, the sound design that wasn’t there in the early ‘90s. What we can do now with sound design, we’re gonna put you on the edge of that 1000-foot cliff, when your fingernails are hanging on to a ledge the size of a penny, when you hear a boulder fly past your head and go to infinity, and your heart beats reverberating off the rocks. I wanna play with the sound design and the jeopardy the way that so many of the movies now, I feel like, just because VFX is there. And now we’re talking about AI and everything else. It’s just becoming more and more fake, and there’s a lot of room for that. I’m okay watching a movie where a car flies out of a plane at 30,000 feet, lands on its wheels, and keeps going in my movie.”
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Are Masculine Action Movies a Dying Breed?
Following the Covid pandemic, many movies that would have been guaranteed box office gold have struggled to make the same kind of impact on cinemas than they would have even a decade ago. Waugh hopes that fans ofgenre movies likeKandaharand theCliffhangersequel really get behind the movies, and make them a real challenge to the likes of Marvel blockbusters and not just something to watch on Netflix. He said:
“I think that these are the movies that, I’ve said before, we need to, especially me being a fan of these types of action movies, they used to drive our box office, they used to be the one that we’d figure out which was gonna be number one on the weekend. And we’re kind of the underdogs now, and I think it’s really important that we embrace that and understand it, that we need to get our butts back at the theater so we’re not just seeing the big animated movies, and not the big Marvel, and the big 2, $300 million tentpole movies. But these adult-driven action movies, they could be a dying breed and then end up on streaming, and that would be a crying shame. So I’m hoping people will support Kandahar and Cliffhanger, and the other things that we’ve got coming out, and everybody else’s movies that are in this part of the woods because they’re important, they could be a dying breed, for sure.”
Waugh’s new movieKandahar, starring Gerard Butler, is released on May 26. Expect more news on hisCliffhangercollaboration with Sylvester Stallone in the near future.
