Donald Trump Bestowing Sylvester Stallone With Kennedy Center Honors Makes Perfect Sense (On A Few Levels)

Donald Trump has announced his selection of honorees for the first Kennedy Center Honors of his second term, and he has somehow restrained himself from picking Dean Cain, Hannibal Lecter, or the movie Kickboxer. Instead, the most MAGA-coded among Trump’s selections is Sylvester Stallone, who is also Trump’s unelected ambassador to Hollywood. Thank you for your service, Sly. Stallone also receives a separate, more singular distinction: He has the worst single filmography of any actor chosen for this honor. (It’s possible that there may be a few Kennedy-honored singers with worse filmographies, and for the purposes of this exercise we will say Bill Cosby is a comedian and sex criminal, not an actor.)

Over the past quarter-century, the film actors chosen for this honor include Tom Hanks, Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Julie Andrews, Elizabeth Taylor, James Earl Jones, Warren Beatty, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, George Clooney, and Billy Crystal. I know what you’re thinking: Most of Billy Crystal’s movies are terrible. This is true, but he does have The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, and Monsters, Inc. to his credit. A lot of people also like City Slickers. Moreover, he takes long breaks from starring in movies. Stallone never lets up, with relentless dedication to making terrible movies that he sometimes also writes. Again, Sly: Thank you for your service. Enjoy being inexplicably placed in the company of Bette Davis and Paul Newman. (Just kidding. The explication is that there are very few outwardly conservative name-brand stars.)

And yet: There is a stopped-clock quality to this choice, especially in 2025, when Stallone can celebrate the 40th anniversary of his biggest year ever. Back in 1985, the man had two of the top three highest-grossing movies in the U.S., both sequels featuring his signature characters of Rocky (in Rocky IV) and John Rambo (in Rambo: First Blood Part II), in stories he wrote where his characters win the Cold War and the Vietnam War, respectively. These movies are also, to be clear, terrible! It’s actually hard to figure out which one is worse. (It’s Rocky IV.) But they speak to a level of box office dominance, however brief, rarely achieved.

Indeed, Stallone never had a year like 1985 again. He had a faint echo of it in 1993, when Cliffhanger and Demolition Man both did well following several years’ worth of flops. And he celebrated the 30^th anniversary of his great triumph with Creed, in which he gives a magnificent performance as, yet again, Rocky Balboa and received a much-deserved Oscar nomination, his first in decades, for his trouble.

Good work does dot the Stallone filmography. In fact, Essential Stallone might be the most manageable category of any movie-star Kennedy honoree. Rocky, Rocky III, Creed, First Blood, Cop Land, Cliffhanger or Demolition Man (no real need to watch both, so take your pick), and maybe The Suicide Squad if you want to chase it with a silly voiceover performance from the superhero era. Add a few more Rocky sequels to taste. That’s it; you’re all set.

And to be fair, those two most famous characters of his are impossibly iconic, even after years of sequels threatening to dilute their power. Stallone came up in the 1970s, and if he was ultimately well-equipped to handle Hollywood’s shift into blockbuster mode the following decade, there are definitely more than traces of New Hollywood in Rocky and even First Blood. They have thrills and violence, but both movies self-effacingly turn on characters who don’t articulate themselves well, whether with the jocular rambling of Rocky Balboa or the taciturn, haunted John Rambo. It’s fascinating (if not necessarily artistically rewarding) to see him adapt those personas into a decade of America winning by torpedoing its future. Stallone’s best later work, specifically Cop Land, throws back to that transition point.

You can see why Stallone would appeal to Trump apart from the conservatism (which has often come across more lunkheaded than malicious, though that was easier to do when he was coming up): He is a movie star so relentlessly dedicated to his brand that he seems almost constitutionally incapable of taking a supporting role unless it’s kind of a goof (as with his James Gunn movies) or he’s stealing scenes via his most famous and beloved character (as with Creed and its first sequel). Otherwise, the man makes Stallone Movies, very often to his detriment. He’s still living in 1985, cooking up deals and getting his name above the title whenever possible. Sound familiar? The difference, of course, is that Stallone’s lunkheaded image has somehow remained at least intermittently likable – maybe because he never decided he needed way more than the movies to stoke his obviously substantial ego. The movies may be bad, but they can’t hurt us.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.