James Franco has joined the cast of John Rambo in a small villain role, adding another familiar name to the prequel that will put Noah Centineo in the title role and David Harbour in a key supporting part.

The film has already wrapped production in Thailand, and the new casting lands as the project moves from set work to postproduction on a franchise that is being rebuilt from the beginning. Jalmari Helander is directing the movie, which is set before 1982’s First Blood and is meant to show the origin of the character long before Sylvester Stallone made him a symbol of action cinema.

Franco’s role is not the centerpiece of the film, but it is notable because it folds him into a major studio action title after he said at Cannes that he had recently finished work on an unnamed “big studio movie.” He said that project would “won’t be ready for this summer, but my guess is it will be end of this year or spring-summer 2027.”

The timing also gives the casting a different weight. Franco said he had been focused on living a “positive life” after a sexual misconduct scandal that pushed him out of the mainstream spotlight for close to a decade. His return in a studio-backed franchise film suggests a careful re-entry rather than a full-scale comeback, with the role small enough to avoid becoming the headline but visible enough to matter.

John Rambo was written by Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani and is being produced by Lionsgate, Millennium Media, Templeton Media and AGBO. Lionsgate will distribute the film, which also features Yao, Jason Tobin, Quincy Isaiah, Jefferson White and Tayme Thapthimthong. For Centineo, the assignment places him at the center of one of Hollywood’s most durable action properties. For Franco, it marks a new on-screen turn after years in the shadow of scandal. The question now is not whether the film exists — it does, and it is already wrapped — but how quickly Lionsgate decides to bring this version of Rambo to theaters.