Sylvester Stallone might be sitting out the upcoming Creed III, but the franchise he created almost 50 years ago shows absolutely no signs of slowing down, with Drago entering development to give the boxing saga the spinoff to a spinoff.
As per The Wrap, writer Robert Lawton is set to pen the screenplay for Amazon-owned MGM, with Dolph Lundgren and Florian Munteanu both set to reprise their roles as father and son. Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about the project, with Drago Sr. teasing it more than once, but the real question on everyone’s lips is surely “why?”.
We got six Rocky movies with Stallone’s Italian Stallion in the lead role, and while that seemed to be the end of the line for the cinematic icon, he came roaring back to life (and landed Sly an Academy Award nomination) in Ryan Coogler’s acclaimed Creed, which ended up getting a sequel of its own.
Michael B. Jordan is making his directorial debut on this year’s third chapter, which sees him facing off against Jonathan Majors, but were there a huge number of people clamoring for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings alum Munteanu to headline his own standalone film?
Ivan Drago was the villain of glorious cheese-fest Rocky IV, while his son Viktor fulfilled the same role in Creed II, so what we have here is the son of a bad guy (who was also a bad guy insofar as the rules of the boxing genre allow) taking center stage in the spinoff to the sequel of a spinoff from a series that already got five sequels spread across 30 years. And who says creativity is dead?