After years of milking his alpha-male image via the risible Expendables franchise and comedies best left forgotten (i.e. Grudge Match), Sylvester Stallone is currently riding high again thanks to his admittedly excellent work in Ryan Coogler's brilliant Creed. Sure, it's a role he's been applying lacquer on for much of the last four decades, but his presence in the role remains potently endearing and convincingly wise when bounced off of Michael B. Jordan's titular character.
The actor has a few big-screen gigs lined up in the wake of his upswing, and on top of these performances, he's now taking on a brand new challenge: television. According to THR, Stallone is set to play the lead role in Omerta, Antoine Fuqua's TV adaptation of the last book in Mario Puzo's series that started with The Godfather and The Last Don. He's said to be playing the head of a familial crime organization, though little about the project - including where it will end up - is known at this point. It would be Stallone's first foray into narrative TV, following a few flirtations with reality television, including his boxing show with Sugar Ray Leonard, The Contender.
It's nice to see Stallone taking on a role thats keeping with a character like the aging Rocky, but this will almost certainly involve some overriding belief that the young gangsters have nothing on the older, wiser ones, and that being old is actually kinda hip. That's often been the underlying thematic spine to Stallone's recent films, which says quite a lot about Stallone's own feelings about getting older. Regardless, I'm interested to see what he can put together with Fuqua, the action-film maestro who will next be seen directing Chris Pratt and Denzel Washington in the anticipated Magnificent Seven remake. Fuqua has touched on the inner-workings of organized crime in his films but with Stallone at the helm of the series, he could make a resonant study of the effects of a lifetime spent as a professional criminal.
