Sylvester Stallone returned to his most famous role in Creed, but he initially refused to sign on because the original script killed off Rocky Balboa.
“I was never comfortable,” Stallone told GQ. “I dodged that bullet for two years, three years. And Ryan Coogler was very persistent, kept pushing it. And we had the same agent, but I didn’t want to do it, because the way he had written it, Rocky dies. He gets Lou Gehrig’s disease.“
Stallone continued, “I have a big thing about characters like that dying, I’d much rather them get on a train going somewhere, you never see them again, but to die, it would just bum the audience out completely.“
The script was rewritten with Balboa now battling non-Hodgkin lymphoma and surviving. “So once we got over that, I said, okay, we’ll give it a shot,” Stallone said. “And it was a lot of dramatic acting in that, ’cause I couldn’t use my body. I’m not fighting. So that was a good challenge. And it turned out pretty well.“
Stallone returned for Creed II, where he reunited with Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago, but he didn’t come back for Creed III. Michael B. Jordan explained that it was time to truly focus on Adonis Creed, saying, “It’s always respect and always a shit-ton of love for what he’s built, but we really want to push and navigate Adonis forward and the family that he created.” Creed IV is in the works.
Rocky’s next appearance, sort of, will come in I Play Rocky, a film about the making of Rocky, the 1976 movie that launched Stallone’s career and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film “tells the true story of an unknown actor with an unshakable belief that he wasn’t just meant to write Rocky — he was meant to be Rocky Balboa. Told no at every turn, Stallone bets everything on himself, holding the line on playing the lead against seemingly impossible odds. The result is the ultimate underdog story behind the ultimate underdog movie.“ Peter Farrelly (Green Book) is directing from a script by Peter Gamble (Trenches). Anthony Ippolito plays Stallone, and the likeness is pretty damn uncanny in set photos.
