Sylvester Stallone said Arnold Schwarzenegger is the “superior” action star even after years of animosity and competition between the two celebrities.

“The ’80s was a very interesting time because the definitive ‘action guy’ had not really been formed yet,” Stallone said in the newly released Netflix documentary “Arnold,” per IndieWire. “Up until that time, action was a car chase like ‘Bullitt’ or ‘The French Connection.’ A film all about intellect and innuendo and verbal this and verbal that.”

Stallone went on to say that Schwarzenegger was one of the first actors to make action movies more focused on the actor rather than the project.

“You actually relied upon your body to tell the story,” the “Rocky” lead said. “Dialogue was not necessary. I saw that there was an opportunity, because no one else was doing this except some other guy from Austria, who doesn’t need to say much… He was superior. He just had all the answers. He had the body. He had the strength. That was his character.”

“I had to get my ass kicked constantly, whereas Arnold, he never got hurt much,” Stallone said of their different on-screen personas. “And I’m going, ‘Arnold, you could go out and fight a dragon and you’d come back with a Band-Aid.’”

Schwarzenegger was equally complimentary toward his contemporary. “Every time he came out with a movie like ‘Rambo II,’ I had to figure out a way of now outdoing that. Without Stallone, I maybe wouldn’t have been as motivated in the ’80s to do the kind of movies that I did and to work as hard as I did. I’m a competitive person,” the Austrian-born actor said. 

Stallone told Forbes last November that he and Schwarzenegger “really disliked each other immensely” in the 80s and continuously for two decades as their action films were always competing.

“We were… this may sound a little vain, but I think we were pioneering a kind of genre at that time and it hasn’t been seen since really,” Stallone told the publication. “So the competition, because it’s his nature, he is very competitive and so am I… and I just thought it actually helped, but off-screen we were still competitive and that was not a healthy thing at all, but we’ve become really good friends.”

Following backlash from consumers fed up with their focus on woke initiatives, executives at U.S. companies have cut their mentions of ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance) and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) on earnings calls by 31% from the same period last year.

Financial research platform AlphaSense reported that the decline of such mentions between April 1 to June 5 by companies represented the largest such year-over-year decline and the fifth straight quarter of year-over-year plunges, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“The easiest thing to do is just to stay out of the conversation and emphasize other facets of business that are going to be perceived as less controversial and more core to the traditional metrics of the business,” Jason Jay, senior lecturer of sustainability at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Journal.

Celebration by conservatives over the decline in mentions may be premature. The Journal points out that scant evidence exists that public companies have reduced the ESG and DEI initiatives. Sustainability reports and greenhouse-gas emissions are still being discussed and executive compensation is often tied to ESG metrics.

Still, there is evidence that the backlash is having an effect. At the electronic-signature firm Docusign, sustainability initiatives, carbon-neutral status, and net-zero emissions have not been mentioned on earning calls since March 2022. Chip maker Qualcomm last specifically addressed ESG topics on an earnings call in February 2022.

Meal-kit provider Blu Apron hasn’t discussed ESG since November 2022.

But James McRitchie, an individual investor in close to 200 companies, told the Journal, “I think companies are going to hush it up more, but they’re going to keep on going with the initiatives.”

The National Center for Public Policy Research has almost doubled the number of proposals it issued from last year that target companies, asserting that their fiduciary duty was being jettisoned if they did not take a neutral stand on social and political issues.

In early June, the latest estimates of the staggering losses suffered by Anheuser-Busch since April 1, the day the Dylan Mulvaney controversy exploded, put their loss in market value at about $27 billion by the end of May.

The company had a $134.55 billion value as of March 31 before it plunged to $107.44 billion by the end of May, according to Dow Jones Market Data Group. The company’s stock plummeted 19.98% from its high in March. That 20% drop entered the zone of a bear market. Bud Light sales revenues dropped 25.7% for the week ending May 20 compared to the same week in 2022, Bump Williams Consulting estimated.

By the end of May, the plummet in Target’s share prices reached the longest losing streak the chain had suffered in almost five years.

Target’s share prices fell for eight straight days as the store lost a staggering $12 billion in market value to rest at $61.85 billion in the wake of a consumer boycott triggered by its LGBTQ merchandise.