Noah Centineo said at CinemaCon 2026 that John Rambo has officially wrapped filming, telling the audience, “We wrapped on Wednesday, so it’s done.” The actor said the prequel finished five days before his remarks in Las Vegas and pointed to Sylvester Stallone’s original Rambo monologue as the film’s creative guide.
Centineo said the movie was built to do justice to the scene in First Blood when Rambo breaks down at the police station with Trautman and explains he cannot keep a job because of what came before. “At least for me, that was my North Star for this prequel, because our John Rambo is the prequel to that story,” he said. “We want people to have a visceral understanding of what he went through that led him to become this revered character that we’ve all come to know.”
John Rambo is being directed by Jalmari Helander and is set up as a prequel to First Blood, the film that made Stallone’s version of the character a lasting action figure. Centineo said the project is aimed less at wall-to-wall action than at Rambo’s trauma and the backstory that shaped him before audiences met him in the 1982 film.
The only real question now is how far the finished film leans into that grim inner life. Centineo suggested the answer is already baked in. “It’s not G. I’ll tell you that,” he said, drawing a line between this story and the more conventional war-movie expectation many viewers may bring to it.