Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Predator Machine Gun Was Basically A Diss Track Aimed At Sylvester Stallone

Long before two action stars could settle a rivalry with a single tweet, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were settling theirs with body counts, biceps, and increasingly enormous prop weapons. The two icons spent the better part of the 1980s trying to one up each other on screen, and decades later they are still laughing about just how far that competition went. Their most candid retelling of it all came during a sit down special that has fans revisiting one of Hollywood’s most entertaining feuds.

The rivalry, as Schwarzenegger tells it, started almost accidentally with a simple comparison of kill counts. Arnold recalled the moment plainly, saying “We ended up kind of like, ‘Well, you killed 28 people in the movie; I killed 32,'” with Stallone reportedly responding “I got to top that.” What began as a passing joke quickly became a full blown arms race between two of the biggest names in action cinema.

That competitive streak did not stop at kill counts. Schwarzenegger and Stallone also sparred over their physiques, with one of them noting the rivalry shifted to body fat percentages, joking about being down to seven percent, while the other countered by claiming to have hit ten percent. The numbers kept climbing on both fronts, and eventually the competition found its way straight into their films.

This is where the screenshot’s central claim comes into focus. According to Schwarzenegger, once Stallone started wielding bigger firepower in the ‘Rambo’ franchise, he felt pressure to match it in his own work, and that pressure directly shaped ‘Predator.’ Arnold explained the mindset behind it, admitting he told himself he needed to have “a bigger machine gun than Sly used in Rambo” once production on ‘Predator’ got underway. The result was the now iconic helicopter mounted minigun sequence that fans still bring up whenever the film comes up in conversation.

The escalation did not end there either. Schwarzenegger noted that once Stallone’s onscreen kill count in ‘Rambo’ reportedly climbed to 80, he felt he needed his own total to reach 87 just to stay ahead of his longtime rival. It is a wild admission, but one that fits perfectly with the larger than life mythology both men built around themselves during that era of action filmmaking.

These comments come from the hourlong TMZ special titled ‘Arnold & Sly: Rivals, Friends, Icons,’ with TMZ founder Harvey Levin conducting the interview, which also explored the pair’s difficult upbringings and their eventual friendship. What makes the story land so well with fans is that Schwarzenegger and Stallone are clearly in on the joke now, treating what was once a genuine professional rivalry as one of the funniest chapters of their careers.

It says a lot about the era that two of the biggest stars in the world were essentially competing over body counts and gun sizes like siblings trying to outdo each other at the dinner table. Which side of this legendary rivalry do you think came out on top, Schwarzenegger’s minigun in ‘Predator’ or Stallone’s arsenal in ‘Rambo?’