Arnold Schwarzenegger Nearly Took One of Sylvester Stallone’s Biggest Flops — And It Was Originally Much Darker
Before Sylvester Stallone’s Judge Dredd crashed and burned, the helmet was earmarked for box office rival Arnold Schwarzenegger—until a meddling producer scuttled the plan and gutted a far darker script.
Here is one of those great what-could-have-been stories: before Sylvester Stallone suited up for 1995's Judge Dredd (aka the neon-lit cautionary tale of mid-90s studio meddling), the plan was to make a much darker version with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It would have centered on Judge Death and the Dark Judges from the 2000 AD comics. Then the studio got involved, power players collided, and that version died on the vine.
The Arnold version we never got
Back in the early 90s, Hellboy writer Peter Briggs was hired to script Judge Dredd. Briggs is a hardcore 2000 AD fan, so he aimed straight for the bleak stuff: Judge Death and the Dark Judges. If you are not deep into the comics, quick primer: the Dark Judges are undead, interdimensional mirror images of Dredd's order, hailing from a parallel world where all life is illegal. In their eyes, living is the ultimate crime and the sentence is always death. That was the tone—grim, uncompromising, and very much the opposite of what we got in theaters.
Arnold was attached, and Tony Scott was in the director's chair. On paper, it makes sense. Schwarzenegger and Stallone were constantly in the same casting conversations back then—Commando, Rambo, you know the drill—but this was less about rivalry and more about clashing visions and bad timing.
Where it went sideways
According to Briggs, a key producer on the project, Charles Lippincott, flat-out hated his take and told him so. This is the kind of inside baseball that explains a lot about the finished movie:
'Yeah. Look, it is nothing personal, but I just wanna say that I am going to do everything I can to make sure that this script with you does not happen.'
After that, the Arnold/Tony Scott package unraveled. Briggs left. Scott left. Schwarzenegger moved on. The door swung open for a very different movie.
What we actually got in 1995
Enter Danny Cannon (years before his CSI era) to direct, with Stallone as Judge Joseph Dredd. The script shifted to a flashier, more crowd-pleasing direction courtesy of William Wisher Jr. (T2) and Steven E. de Souza (Die Hard). Instead of extradimensional undead judges, the plot leaned into a melodramatic rival-turned-enemy angle, with Dredd framed for murder and a lot of big swings about power, order, and anarchy. It is brighter, louder, and, depending on your tolerance for mid-90s sci-fi kitsch, either a guilty pleasure or a cautionary tale. James Earl Jones pops in as the narrator, and Rob Schneider handles the comic relief. Critics, to put it gently, were not won over; the film became one of Stallone's more notorious misfires.
1995 Judge Dredd: the quick specs
- Director: Danny Cannon
- Writers: William Wisher Jr., Steven E. de Souza
- Based on: Judge Dredd by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra
- Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Armand Assante, Diane Lane, Rob Schneider, James Earl Jones (narrator), Jurgen Prochnow, Max von Sydow
- Runtime: 96 minutes
- Producers: Charles Lippincott, Beau E. L. Marks
- Distributor: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution
- Release date: June 30, 1995
- Budget: $85–90 million
- Box office: $113.5 million
- Rotten Tomatoes: 21%
- IMDb: 5.6
Would the Judge Death version with Arnold and Tony Scott have worked? We will never know, but it is hard not to think that brutal, horror-tinged direction fit the source material better than the glossy buddy-rival plot we got.
If you want to revisit the chaos, Judge Dredd (1995) is available to rent/buy on Amazon Prime Video. And if you are a 2000 AD lifer, yes, I am also thinking about how wild a proper Dark Judges movie could be.