With Tulsa King still fresh in viewers’ minds after its explosive second season finale, Paramount is giving Sylvester Stallone fans even more reason to celebrate. While The General bides his time until Season 3, one of Stallone’s earliest and most defining action roles is heading to free streaming. Beginning July 1, First Blood — the 1982 action-thriller that introduced audiences to John Rambo — will be available to stream on Pluto TV, letting a whole new audience experience the film that helped cement Stallone as a household name.
While Stallone was already known for Rocky, First Blood proved he wasn’t just the scrappy underdog — he was also a full-fledged action icon. With a quieter, more psychologically tormented performance than his usual macho hero routine, Stallone turned Rambo into something more than just a one-man army. He made him human.
What Is ‘First Blood’ About?
Long before Rambo: Last Blood turned the franchise into a glorified slasher, the original First Blood was something entirely different — intimate, brutal, and surprisingly emotional. A genuinely thoughtful film about trauma, and the struggle to move on. The story follows John Rambo, a Vietnam vet drifting through small-town Washington in search of a fallen comrade’s family. Instead of finding peace, he’s met with hostility from local law enforcement, led by Brian Dennehy’s Sheriff Will Teasle.
What starts as harassment escalates into psychological warfare, as Rambo’s PTSD is triggered by police abuse. He flees into the forest, where he uses his survival skills and military training to fight back, eventually drawing the National Guard and his former commander, Colonel Trautman (played by Richard Crenna) into the fray.
Directed by Ted Kotcheff and co-written by Stallone himself, the film adapted David Morrell’s 1972 novel with a lean, stripped-down intensity. The result was a film far more interested in trauma and systems of violence than bullets and bravado — though, of course, it still delivers the goods on that front, too.
And the ending was meant to be different, too, because in Morrell’s original novel, Rambo dies. But after test screenings left audiences devastated by the character’s fate, the ending was changed, giving the iconic soldier a new lease on life. That decision turned out to be franchise gold — First Blood earned over $125 million against an $18 million budget, spawning four sequels, comic books, animated series, video games, and enough pop culture references to fill a battalion.
First Blood begins streaming for free on Pluto TV starting July 1.