Throughout their careers, the pair had an epic rivalry, one that began with an argument at the 1977 Golden Globe awards and continued as the two battled for box office dominance. While Sly had the greater dramatic and creative chops, as demonstrated by his nuanced turns in the first Rambo and Rocky movies, Arnold tended to score bigger box office hits. That latter problem came to particularly gall Sly when Arnold won over audiences in comedies Twins and Kindergarten Cop, while Stallone’s forays into the genre, Rhinestone and Oscar, were critical and financial flops. In 1994, Sly added to that list of unsuccessful comedies with Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, in which he starred as tough cop Joe Bomowski, whose life gets turned upside down after his mother Tutti (Golden Girls‘s Estelle Getty) comes to live with him. The ensuing comic high jinks were enough for the movie to make decent money, but only further solidified Sly’s reputation as a lesser comedy star than Arnold. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stallone points his finger at a few different sources for the movie’s failure. Originally, “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was supposed to be like Throw Momma From the Train with the mom as this really nasty piece of work,” Sly explained, referencing the 1987 comedy starring Billy Crystal and frequent Schwarzenegger comedy collaborator Danny DeVito. “Instead you hire the nicest woman in Hollywood, Estelle Getty, who you wish was your mother.” For Stallone, Getty’s energy threw off the tone of the movie, something that could not be overcome by director Roger Spottiswoode (who would later helm the Arnold sci-fi flop The 6th Day). Although THR did not get Sly’s response to the confirmation, the interview does end with Stallone’s thoughts on his rivalry with Arnold. “We start goofing around and being crazy – just laughing at the old times,” Stallone admitted. “I told him: ‘We are the last two tyrannosaurus’ … So we better enjoy each other.” As kind as that thought may be, Arnold has perhaps the wiser outlook when explaining that the rivalry is dead. “Thank God, because we sure don’t ever need another Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.”
