Rambo 5 looks like it's finally going to happen, as Millenium Films is in the process of launching presales at the Cannes Film Festival, which is going on now in France. Sylvester Stallone is expected to begin shooting the project in September, assuming all goes well. This time around, John Rambo is going to be taking on the Mexican cartel, but it didn't start out that way. It turns out, Rambo 5 was originally going to feature Stallone taking on an intelligent, inhuman monster.

The last time we saw the legendary character on screen was in 2008's Rambo, which was ultraviolet and successful enough at the box office to warrant talk of a fifth installment. When Nu Image and Millennium Films announced a fifth movie in 2009, it was referred to as Rambo V: The Savage Hunt. Initial reports indicated that the movie would have taken place in the Pacific Northwest and would have featured a secret military operation attempting to create super soldiers, taking the franchise in a sci-fi direction. Sylvester Stallone came out once these reports started making the rounds to clarify the movie's plot, making it known that this wouldn't be like Universal Soldier. Instead, it was going to be closer to Rambo vs. Predator. Here's what he had to say about it at the time.

"It's not a Universal Soldier... it's not me fighting a super soldier... it's actually a feral beast. It's a... thing. It's this amalgamation of fury and intelligence and pure, unadulterated rage. It's before men became... hu-men. This is when they were still inhuman. And so, what [Rambo] confronts is something that is everyone's nightmare. But in no sense of the word does he go against the Dolph Lundgren or Jean-Claude Van Damme super soldier. He's going against a feral beast that has absolute cunning and intelligence and a will to survive that is only matched by Rambo's. And that's what makes it uniquely different... man's conscience fighting his dark, dangerous, uncontrollable subconscious. Very similar to the plot in Forbidden Planet... when the doctor couldn't control his mind and his subconscious took over and became a savage killing machine. It's your worst nightmare. You're battling your primitive self."

That is obviously quite a bit different than the version of Rambo 5 we're going to be getting and would have totally changed the nature of the franchise. This plot was said to be based, at least loosely, on the 1999 novel Hunter by James Byron Huggins. Stallone actually had the rights to the book, which features a half-human, genetically created monster that gets loose in the Arctic Circle, leaving a tracker named Nathaniel Hunter to stop it before making its way to civilization.

Instead, we're getting John Rambo saving a friend's daughter from violent Mexican cartels. On the one hand, that seems much more on-brand for Rambo. On the other hand, how cool would it (possibly) have been to see one of the most awesome action heroes ever to grace the silver screen duking it out with a crazy monster? We'll probably never know the answer to that question, but we do have Rambo 5 to look forward to in the relatively near future. This was previously reported by Bloody Disgusting.