It’s easy to forget that Sylvester Stallone has characters within the canon of both DC and Marvel’s cinematic universes. He recently voiced King Shark in The Suicide Squad, and also appeared as the gruff Ravager Stakar Ogord in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2.
That’s not even taking into account his shouty, poorly received performance as Judge Dredd in the 1995 flop. We’re holding out for Sly as a proper hero, and not just the Rambo/Rocky type that’s tenuously grounded in the laws of physics and reality.
In a new Prime Video original, Stallone plays a reserved old lonely guy who turns out to be former masked hero Samaritan, long though dead after an epic battle twenty years ago. Samaritan hits Prime on August 26, and we’re hoping it’ll give us the SuperSly we’ve been waiting so long for.
Javon “Wanna” Walton stars as a 13-year-old boy in the fictional Granite City, a town on the brink of devolving into all-out crime-ridden crisis. Shit has really hit the fan ever since the super-powered vigilante Samaritan seemingly died in a fire while fighting his nemesis…Nemesis. Yep, that’s the villain’s name.
Could the grumpy, mysterious man next door be Samaritan, going undercover as a civilian after faking his own death? And even better, could he be coaxed back into action after all these years? It would be a pretty boring movie if not, we suppose, so get ready for Overlord director Julius Avery to film Stallone punching a lot of mooks and hopefully showing off some zoomy, glowy superpowers.
Something that gives us a bit of pause about Samaritan is the fact that the film was shot in 2020 and scheduled for release in November of that year. Ever since Prime bought the movie studio MGM, it’s shuttled plenty of the company’s films straight to its streaming service: so Stallone’s modern attempt at superheroics won’t be seen on the big screen. Bummer.
It can be enjoyed in comic book form, though, with writer Bragi F. Schut’s original screenplay also getting adapted into a graphic novel for Mythos Comics.
The script was written first. Then adapted into a comic.
— Bragi (@bragischutjr) July 4, 2022
Glimpses of Samaritan‘s costume are definitely giving Batman vibes, or perhaps more accurately, The Boys‘ parody of the stoic emo avenger, Noir. They could’ve basically repurposed the same suit and mask, if Amazon was looking to cut costs.
Stay tuned for further info on Samaritan, including the official trailer once it’s available. That should give us a better idea as to whether we’re getting another Judge Dredd, or a new original super-classic, with plenty of muscle and furious lip-curling.
