Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson Wishes Sylvester Stallone A Happy Birthday On Instagram

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Sylvester Stallone have been among the primary action-adventure movie stars of their respective eras. And while the two have never made a movie together, they appear to be friends. Plus, one played Rocky, and the other was known as The Rock.

Stallone turned 73 on Saturday, and his friend, Johnson, wished him a happy birthday on Instagram over the weekend.

“Happy Birthday brother,” Johnson said in a comment on Stallone’s Instagram post. “Salud we’ll celebrate soon.”

The birthday post, which included Stallone in front of a birthday cake with candles, notched over 700,000 likes as of Monday at around noon.

The two men are often mentioned together in news stories about the movie business. Johnson, per Comicbook, left a social media comment back in May stating how excited he was for Stallone’s upcoming film Rambo V: Last Blood.

Per CBS Sports, Stallone and Johnson were among those urging recently retired New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski to pursue an acting career in action films, amid rumors in early 2018 that the athlete was thinking about retiring from football.

The Australian version of GQ wrote last month that Johnson “has set course along the Sly Stallone career path.”

“There’s still hope that he can avoid joining the likes of Stallone and Arnie and others, these victims of their own success, forever retracing their own steps and repeating versions of the same tired lines, well into retirement age,” the story said, in reference to Stallone continuing to appear in sequels to movies he made decades ago, most notably in the Rocky and Rambo franchises.

In addition to the Rambo sequel, which comes out in September, Stallone is starring this year in a sequel to The Escape Plan called Escape Plan: The Extractors, although that film was released direct-to-VOD in the United States.

A project called Scarpa, in which Stallone had been set to star as the late mob enforcer and informant Gregory Scarpa, was announced in 2014, per Deadline. It doesn’t appear that movie was ever made, and Stallone is now nearly a decade older than Scarpa was when he died. That movie was to be written by Nicolas Pileggi, the screenwriter of the famed mob film Goodfellas.

Dwayne Johnson’s next movie is the Fast and Furious spinoff Hobbes & Shaw, which arrives in August. It will be followed by the sequel Jumanji: The Next Level, which arrives in theaters in December. The actor’s next film after that is the Disney movie Jungle Cruise, which is scheduled for release in July of 2020.