Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone are sharing the screen again — but it’s not a new Expendables movie. The Austrian Oak and the Italian Stallion’s famed feud defined the 1980s as much as their respective runs on such iconic action films as Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, Commando, Predator, and Rocky, Rambo, and Cobra. For the first time, the foes-turned-friends and co-stars are sitting down to discuss their blockbuster rivalry. Fox has released a sneak peek at TMZ Presents: Arnold & Sly: Rivals, Friends, Icons, a new special that will examine the Schwarzenegger-Stallone saga in their own words.
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Fox describes the hour-long special: “TMZ exclusively sits down with Arnold Schwarzenegger and SylvesterStallone as they discuss for the first time how their once-fiercerivalry led to two Hollywood icons forever being friends and brothers inarms.” Arnold & Sly: Rivals, Friends, Icons airs April 23 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Fox and will be available to watch the next day on Hulu.
After investing in and promoting the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain in the 1990s, Schwarzenegger and Stallone went on to appear together in 2010’s The Expendables and two sequels, 2012’s Expendables 2 and 2014’s Expendables 3. They co-headlined the 2013 movie Escape Plan, and Schwarzenegger recently appeared on Stallone’s Paramount+ reality series The Family Stallone.
During an October appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Schwarzenegger admitted that his rivalry with Stallone “got out of control” when they were competing as No. 1 action star in the ’80s and ’90s.
“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 ourfilms and we had to have the biggest guns,” Schwarzenegger said. “It gotout of control and we tried to derail each other.”
“Then when we both invested in Planet Hollywood, we started flyingaround the world together to promote it and we became fantasticfriends,” he added. “He is a great human being and we are nowinseparable.”
Schwarzenegger and Stallone have since released their own documentaries — the three-episode docuseries Arnold, and the feature-length documentary film Sly —on Netflix. In 2022, Stallone told Forbes that he and Schwarzenegger “really disliked each other immensely” before their rivarly developed into friendship.
“This maysound a little vain, but I think we were pioneering a kind of genre atthat time and it hasn’t been seen since really,” Stallone said at the time of their macho action movies. “So the competition, because it’s hisnature, he is very competitive and so am I… and I just thought itactually helped, but off-screen we were still competitive and that wasnot a healthy thing at all, but we’ve become really good friends.”
TMZ Presents: Arnold & Sly: Rivals, Friends, Icons is executive produced by Harvey Levin, Ryan Regan, Don Nash, CharlesLatibeaudiere and Jess Fusco, with co-executive producer Susan Favre. The special premieres April 23 on Fox.
