Actor and former Disney star Noah Centineo is now attached to star in a prequel to the Rambo franchise, according to reports.
Centineo will play a younger version of John Rambo, the character made famous by Sylvester Stallone in a series of action movies. Deadline reports that producers hope the film, titled John Rambo, will begin shooting in Thailand later this year.
Centineo, 29, is a former Disney Channel actor perhaps best known for starring in the To All The Boys… romantic comedy franchise. More recently he played a spy in Netflix’s The Recruit, which was canceled earlier this year after two seasons.
At the Los Angeles premiere of his movie Warfare, Centineo said of the cancellation: “You know, it is what it is. Netflix has a certain mandate that they need to fill.”
He added: “I’m very proud of the show; very grateful to our audience. You know, we have a pretty strong cult following. And with Netflix, it just didn’t fit with what it needed, I suppose. [So] onto the next I guess.”
The Recruit, which debuted in 2022, follows Centineo’s fledgling CIA lawyer Owen Hendricks as he becomes embroiled in an international conflict.
In Alex Garland’s Warfare, Centineo played a gunner in a realistic recreation of an actual battle during the Iraq War.
Stallone played Rambo in five films, starting with First Blood (1982) and reprising the role in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Rambo III (1988), Rambo (2008) and Rambo: Last Blood (2019).
According to reports, Stallone is not involved in the upcoming prequel film but has been made aware that Centineo is attached.
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Stallone most recently appeared in the critically panned Alarum. The actor starred in the action-thriller about two married spies (Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald) who are suspected of going rogue.
The film has a critical score of 0 percent on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. This makes it Stallone’s lowest-rated film in his five-decade career.
For comparison, his lowest-rated film ahead of Alarum was the 2014 comedy thriller Reach Me, which amassed 4 percent, the 2018 sequel Escape Plan 2: Hades sat at 8 percent and the drama Backtrace (2018), which has 9 percent.
Alarum’s audience score isn’t much better; it has a paltry 20 percent. However, there are two Stallone films considered even worse by the public, with Escape Plan sequels The Extractors (2019) and Hades sitting at 13 percent and 14 percent, respectively.
Stallone emerged as a vocal Trump supporter after the last election, calling the president “a mythical character” and his election win a feat that nobody else “in the world could have pulled off.”
