Sylvester Stallone to Star in Spy Movie for Amazon

Movies

Sly is coming back to Amazon. Deadline exclusively reports that Amazon Studios has acquired the rights to Never Too Old to Die, a script by Brian Otting that’s being produced by Balboa Productions, with Sylvester Stallone intending to star. Never Too Old to Die will feature Stallone as a former Cold Warrior living in “a retirement home for spies” who must use his old skills to find a murderer. This acquisition is part of a first-look deal Balboa Productions has with Amazon that will see movies and series written by, produced by, directed by, and/or starring Stallone. Sly previously starred in the Amazon superhero movie Samaritan, and he has the crime series Tulsa King at Paramount+, as well as a reality show called The Family Stallone to debut there next month.

I hope it’s better than Samaritan; I love Sly, but that movie was so awful I don’t know how I made it through the whole thing. Never Too Old to Die isn’t being made by the same people, though a look at Brian Otting’s repertoire doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. But I do like the premise a lot; it reminds me a bit of a book I enjoyed called Mad Dogs by James Grady (writer of Six Days of the Condor, which became the classic spy movie Three Days of the Condor) about a nuthouse for spies who’d been driven crazy by their espionage careers. This could be a neat spy thriller, with Stallone’s out-to-pasture Cold War agent a metaphor for the way geopolitical realities sometimes shift but often find themselves coming back to their starting point. But that’s just a guess. I’m always glad to see Sylvester Stallone in a movie again; I just hope he’s got something worthy of him this time. I also need to get moving and subscribe to Paramount+ so I can watch Tulsa King, which looks great.