And the hits just kept on coming.
In 1993, Stallone starred in Renny Harlin’s “Die-Hard”-on-a-mountaintop actioner “Cliffhanger,” a $70 million movie that earned $255 million. Ford, that same year, starred in Andrew Davis’ “The Fugitive,” an adaptation of the 1963 TV series. “Cliffhanger” wasn’t an awards-bait kind of movie, but “The Fugitive” was up for seven Oscars, including Best Picture.
In 2001, Stallone re-teamed with Harlin for the race car movie “Driven,” which Stallone actually wrote. “Driven” was panned by critics, and even earned several Razzie nominations, and it’s even considered a bomb, making only about $55 million on a $94 million budget. None of this stopped “Driven” from opening at #1 at the box office, making $12 million. Ford, meanwhile, returned to the role of Indiana Jones in 2008 with Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” That film took $185 million to make, and it’s usually lambasted by fans, but it opened at #1, and earned over $786 million.
2010 handed Stallone a big hit with “The Expendables,” another film he wrote, and that starred multiple 1980s-era action stars. The $80 million film earned about $275 million. Stallone was banking on his action legacy, and it worked. Ford, meanwhile, did the same thing in 2015, returning to play Han Solo in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” one of the highest-grossing films of all time.
In the ’20s, both actors had bomb-like hits. In 2021, James Gunn’s $185 million superhero flick “The Suicide Squad” only earned $169 million at the box office, a victim of the peak Covid era. Stallone played the voice of King Shark in that film, and, because it technically opened at #1, counts as one of the actor’s hits. Likewise, Harrison Ford’s 2023 film “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is also a bomb, mostly because the film cost $387 million to make. It still opened at number one, and of course, Ford most recently was the best part of “Captain America: Brave New World,” another number one movie.
That’s almost 60 years of blockbusters for both of them.
