Three Decades Later, Sylvester Stallone Still Thinks Demolition Man Was Ahead of Its Time

I never need an excuse to talk about Demolition Man, but Sylvester Stallone just handed me a good one. He sat down with GQ to look back at his biggest hits (yes, Rocky and Rambo came up), and he led with the 1993 cult sci-fi chaos machine where he plays a cop frozen in the 90s and thawed out when a supervillain breaks loose in a squeaky-clean future. Turns out Sly still loves it — and he almost didn’t walk away from a couple of the stunts.

Still proud of that future-shock movie

Stallone says Demolition Man doesn’t just hold up — it feels uncomfortably close to reality now. He points to how the movie exaggerated manners and meekness in society to the point of parody, and he’s not convinced it’s that far off.

"I think it was a great movie... one of the few films that really holds up. It’s almost close to happening... we call it the 'gentilization of society.' Everything’s so meek."

He remembers feeling at the time that it was oddly contemporary despite being set in a sanitized tomorrow (you know, the one where Taco Bell reigns supreme). And he’s still high on how it turned out.

Wesley Snipes, turned up to 11

Stallone lights up talking about Wesley Snipes as Simon Phoenix. He calls Snipes a wild, high-energy presence and a legitimately good fighter. During the kicking exchanges, Stallone says he could feel the impact, and credits Snipes for digging in and crafting a villain you can’t forget — right down to the hair, the voice, the whole vibe. In Sly’s words, Snipes was at the top of his game.

The on-set scares that got a little too real

Here’s the part that surprised me: the movie’s slick future-tech? A lot of it actually worked on set. Stallone loved the production design, calling it practical in the literal sense — the machinery functioned. Which is cool… until it’s not.

• The giant claw: Sly says the mechanical claw you see onscreen was not a gentle prop. He calls this and one other sequence the two most dangerous stunts he has ever done. The hydraulics could drift, and the metal had real force behind it — enough to seriously mess you up if it went sideways.
• The cryo-freeze tub: For the freezing scene, they locked him into a round, bolted-down tub with thick plexiglass — the kind he says you couldn’t crack with a sledgehammer. Crew started pouring in warm oil (yes, warm oil — movie magic is weird) to simulate the fluid, and it kept rising past the mark. The stuff didn’t drain or cut off when it should have, and Stallone was stuck inside. He only got out because crew members busted him free with sledgehammers and hatchets. If that had gone wrong, imagine the headline: his last completed movie would have been Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!

So yeah, Stallone still rides hard for Demolition Man — the movie, the look, the performances, all of it — and has the scars to prove it.

Where do you rank Demolition Man in Sly’s filmography, and does it still play in 2025?