Cliffhanger Is 25 Years Old

Cliffhanger was put into cinemas 25 years ago.

The film was a much needed hit for Sylvester Stallone, coming off a streak of duds, if not all necessarily bad movies, most of them performing poorly. Stallone went out of his way to convince Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin that he would be humble actor and allow Harlin to do his work.

Although reception wasn’t initially positive for the first cut of the movie.  Stallone later told AICN;

…the director’s cut was met with a lot of disapproval at the screening and received some alarmingly low scores. Mainly because the stunts were absurdly overblown. For example, the average man can jump maybe twelve feet across a gorge, and the stunts had me leaping maybe three hundred feet or more, so situations like that had to be pared down and still then were fairly extreme… so you’re probably better off with this cut. By the way, the 2nd unit crew that filmed the majority of the action was extraordinary.

Talk of a sequel has been on/off again for over 20 years.  Originally, Cliffhanger: The Dam was touted in 1994, seeing Stallone’s character Gabe take on terrorists at the Hoover dam.  Then again Stallone hyped the project in 2008.

Stallone spoke of it again in 2015.  But who knows, it sounds like a demanding role, and Stallone isn’t getting younger.  For the original, Stallone said that he specifically worked out his legs, cranking out merciless one-legged squats, to the point of hurting his knees.  Would he be up for this type of stuff now?  Using superhuman legs to jump to rock faces and such?

Cliffhanger was a huge success.  260 million from a 70 million budget.