Sylvester Stallone Nearly Starred In A Disappointing Stephen King Crime Thriller

After a dismal 1990s that greatly diminished his stature as one of the most bankable movie stars in Hollywood, Sylvester Stallone kicked off the 2000s with a pair of box office disappointments in "Get Carter" and "Driven." Though the latter reunited him with his "Cliffhanger" director Renny Harlin (eight years in the rearview, and his most recent box office smash at the time), moviegoers had very little interest in a film about CART racing. With his two most valuable franchises, "Rocky" and "Rambo," mothballed due to lack of commercial interest, his once reliable international popularity on the wane, and a finished movie ("D-Tox") gathering dust on the shelf due to horrid test screening scores, Stallone had to humble himself and make a movie that didn't lose tens of millions of dollars for its investors. This meant working small and not demanding a bank-breaking payday.

Stallone was lost, as you can tell from one look at the movies he made around this time. The direct-to-video flop "Avenging Angelo," the inert poker thriller "Shade," and Robert Rodriguez's pedestrian "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over" were the half-hearted work of a struggling artist who'd lost his once palpable connection with mainstream audiences. Stallone eventually found his way off the ropes when he realized Rocky and Rambo had been gone long enough for people to get nostalgic about them, but it's intriguing to consider what might've happened had he played the heavy in an unmade adaptation of a Stephen King novella.

In the immediate wake of "Driven" hitting the box office wall in 2001 (and "D-Tox" getting completely bumped from Universal's release schedule), Stallone's most promising project was "Dolan's Cadillac." Based on King's nasty yarn about a grief-stricken widower who plots some dish-served-cold revenge on the big-time mobster who murdered his wife, Stallone would've played the eponymous gangster opposite Kevin Bacon's regular-guy-turned-killer. This was to be Stacy Title's first directorial effort after her controversial dark-comedy debut "The Last Supper," and the script she'd written with her husband Jonathan Penner had generated positive buzz all over Hollywood.

Still, Stallone coming on board to play Dolan was a surprise. The character is more talked about (and feared) than seen in Title and Penner's script, and, well, he's an absolute monster (much different from the mobster Stallone plays on "Tulsa King"). It would've been a welcome shakeup for Stallone (who hadn't put in the work as an actor since James Mangold's "Cop Land"), but he ditched "Dolan's Cadillac" in the fall of '01, reportedly because he only wanted to work on non-violent projects.

The novella was eventually made into a film starring Wes Bentley as the widower and Christian Slater as Dolan, but it released direct-to-DVD with zero fanfare in 2010. Title and Penner had no involvement in the movie, and it received poor reviews when it was reviewed at all. (The major trades seem to have skipped it, which is remarkably rare.) Maybe this was one of the rare occasions that Stallone knew what he was doing in the early 2000s.