Twitter fired up over Stallone 'insult'

It probably isn’t a good idea to offend a country of nearly 200 million people – particularly if you’ve just shot a movie there.

But Sylvester Stallone has done just that with The Expendables, about a group of ageing mercenaries trying to overthrow a South American dictator.

Explaining why he chose to shoot the ultra-violent in Brazil, he said: “You can shoot people and blow things up and they say, ‘Thank you! Take a monkey home with you!’ We couldn’t have pulled off what we did [somewhere else].

We blew up huge plots of land. It was like, Everybody bring their hot dogs. We’re having a BBQ today. We’re gonna blow up this village.”

He was speaking at the annual Comic-Con convention in San Diego on Thursday – where he also picked up an award: a Guinness World Records certificate for having created the most popular sports-related movie franchise ever, Rocky, which went from bad to worse from 1976 to 1990, earning $1.2 billion (Dh4.4bn) along the way.

Stallone then ridiculed the security situation in the country, joking about the police in Rio de Janeiro - which apparently wear uniforms stamped with a skull, two guns, and a knife, according to a report posted on the Alt Film Guide blog.

Brazilians around the world have been outraged, taking to the social networking site Twitter to say, in capital letters, “Cala Boca Sylvester Stallone”, which reportedly translates as “Shut Up, Sylvester Stallone”.

Describes as a “brazilian campaign to protest the actor Sylvester Stallone, for trying to denigrate the Brazilian image,” it is now the top trending topic on Twitter.

Mainstream media have also since gotten in on the act, with several publications criticising the actor and his “tasteless jokes”.

The actor has since issued an apology.

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