A run of videos showing Sylvester Stallone, now 80, leaping between exploding trucks and spinning through the air on what looks like a film set has spread across X and Instagram. Cinemaserietv reports that none of it is real: the clips were made with generative AI.
The trend traces back to a post on X on 23 August that presented a clip as behind-the-scenes footage of a new action film and asked viewers whether they could still jump like that at his age. It drew more than 1.8 million views, and one Instagram repost of a similar reel passed 3.8 million views and 167,000 likes. Within days, feeds filled with copycat versions, each more extreme than the last, and many commenters took them as proof of the actor's fitness. Stallone was dropped into ever less plausible situations, from mid-air pirouettes to slow-motion somersaults with everything exploding around him, and the more spectacular the scene, the more it was shared and imitated, until the fake stunts became a format of their own.
Comments under the reposts read like fan tributes. People hailed him as a real-life Rocky, and one post on X turned the clip into a lesson about diet, exercise and peace of mind, urging anyone who thinks they are too old to give up to look at him.
Sharper-eyed viewers spotted the giveaways. The crew all wear identical T-shirts, Stallone performs flips with no visible safety harness, and he stands right beside blasts with no safety perimeter, something no professional production would permit for an actor of any age, let alone one in his eighties. To anyone who knows even a little about set safety, the outlet says, the footage looks wrong at once. The outlet says the realism of the movement, faces and lighting shows how far video generators have come: deepfake clips can no longer be spotted at first glance the way they once could, and social feeds can turn one fake into a collective trend within days.
Stallone has not commented, and his official Instagram carries on with ordinary updates. Cinemaserietv points out that he did perform many of his own stunts in his prime, which helps explain why fans were ready to believe the clips. Its closing argument is that respect for his career, and nostalgia for the heroes of one's youth, should not switch off basic scepticism about footage that is plainly impossible.
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