Sylvester Stallone To Finally Write And Direct 'Hunter'?

For those interested in a fifth Rambo movie from Sylvester Stallone, the name Hunter might sound familiar. It's a novel by James Byron Huggins with a sci-fi premise, in which a specialized, elite hunter takes aim at a "half-human abomination created by a renegade agency" that is tearing through sparse areas north of the Arctic Circle.

Stallone has owned the rights to the novel for years, and has taken different approaches to potentially turn it into a film. One involved making it a fifth Rambo movie, which we reported on back in 2009. Now Stallone is back to working with the material, and looks ready to make the film at LionsGate.

Reports saying that LionsGate has fast-tracked the project seem to stem from Yahoo, but it is difficult to pin down exactly where. (This one says "reportedly," suggesting that the info came from somewhere else, for example.)

So for now this seems less than set, but thanks to the fact that Stallone has been working with the material for so long, it's easy to imagine that he'll finally get around to making it. Here's the basic plot:

A beast is loose somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. It has already decimated a secret research facility and annihilated a squad of elite military guards. And the raging creature is headed south toward civilization, ready to wreak bloody devastation. It is a job Hunter cannot turn down, but he soon discovers that his prey is terror incarnate, a half-human abomination created by a renegade agency through a series of outlawed genetic experiments. It has man's cunning, a predator's savageness, and a prehistoric power that has transcended the ages. And even if Hunter survives its unrelenting hunger for human blood, he'll still have to confront the grim reality that it may have grown immortal.