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Actors don’t always pick the best projects for themselves — as Sylvester Stallone found out with COP LAND.

The R rated crime drama, written & directed by James Mangold (“GIRL, INTERRUPTED”), also starred Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta & Robert De Niro. Stallone was eager to do COP and to make himself available, he didn’t make other films that were already on his radar.

The biggest of those was the 1996 action crime thriller ERASER, directed by Chuck Russell (THE MASK). Stallone would have played a U.S. Marshal in the Federal Witness Security Protection Program, whose specialty is erasing high-profile witnesses’ identities. Made for $100M with Arnold Schwarzenegger starring instead, it did $242.3M worldwide.

COP’s slim $15M budget worked only because its stars worked for scale. It opened Aug 15, 1997 via Miramax and grossed $44.9M worldwide — a disappointing result for a picture Miramax expected to make a big boxoffice impact.

Stallone liked COP because he thought he’d be playing a part that would put him back on Hollywood’s A-list. In COP, Stallone is the overweight sheriff of a small New Jersey community, who’s dealing with corrupt New York City cops living in his town. This wasn’t an easy role for Stallone to take on since he also had to take on 40 pounds, but eating stacks of pancakes daily apparently did the trick.

Actually, COP’s premise about corrupt NYC cops living in NJ wasn’t accurate. A disclaimer following the end credits acknowledged: “This film is a work of fiction. It is currently illegal for New York City Police officers to live outside the state of New York.”

COP marked a big change from the comedies Stallone was doing then and which had failed at the boxoffice. His 1991 crime comedy OSCAR, directed by John Landis (THE BLUES BROTHERS), cost $35M to produce and did $23.6M. His action comedy STOP! OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT, directed by Roger Spottiswoode (48 HRS.), had a $45M budget and only grossed $70.6M.

COP stretched Stallone’s acting skills and brought him good reviews. He said he had fun shooting it, but felt it hurt rather than helped his career. In a 2019 interview, he said Mangold was “the best director I ever worked with (but doing the film) worked in reverse. It was pretty good critically, but the fact that it didn’t do a lot of box office again fomented the opinion that I had my moment and was going the way of the dodo bird and the Tasmanian tiger.”

Mangold suggested in a 2020 interview that the hype driven by COP’s all-star cast “overscaled the movie…I’m very proud of the movie and the ideas in it, but one of the things that was difficult for me at the time was that I’d imagined the lead being someone you hadn’t heard of before, so their extension into a hero would be less Hollywood.”