The original ending of First Blood had John Rambo, an ex-Special Forces super-soldier in Vietnam, pulling a gun from his mentor’s holster and asking him to pull the trigger: “You trained me. You made me. You kill me.” Finally surrounded after waging war against seemingly every armed man within CB range in the Pacific north-west – a local police department, inept “weekend warriors” for the national guard, the US army – Rambo wants his Green Beret Geppetto to kill him rather than the strangers that don’t understand him. Moreover, he wants to be released from the pain he carries from a conflict that scarred him physically and mentally overseas and left him despised and unmoored at home. His mentor obliges.
Test audiences hated that ending. As did Kirk Douglas, who was originally cast as Rambo’s creator, Colonel Sam Trautman, before Richard Crenna eventually stepped into the role. The director, Ted Kotcheff, at the urging of his star (and the film’s co-writer) Sylvester Stallone, anticipated the reaction enough to conceive of an alternate ending on the spot, one where the hero takes a more dignified perp walk out of the sheriff’s office. The new ending turned out to be great for Stallone’s pocketbook – the franchise has four sequels and inspired Gizmo to fight back in Gremlins 2: The New Batch – and it plays better, too, still sobering without having to be so abrupt.
