Sylvester Stallone isn’t one for giving up easily when it comes to his signature characters. The action icon has played cinema’s most famous boxer Rocky Balboa eight times, and this weekend will see him returning as John Rambo in fifth installment Last Blood. Appearing in thirteen movies as two of cinema’s most iconic heroes is pretty good going, but Sly doesn’t seem to be done with Rocky just yet.
After taking a supporting role in Creed and Creed II, which also resulted in one of the best performances of a distinguished career that earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the former, there’ve been rumors that Stallone was looking to put the ‘Italian Stallion’ front and center again in a seventh installment separate from the Adonis Creed narrative.
In a recent interview, the veteran star gave a small and frustratingly vague update on the status of the proposed seventh Rocky movie, as well as admitting during the course of the same interview that he was likely done with the Creed franchise, having seemingly brought the character’s arc in that particular series as far as he could.
“I have a thing that… it’s politically, you would say, vital right now. It’s that, too. It’s right on the edge. Also, it deals also with a foreign country. Well, you’ve heard a little bit about it and they want it badly. Yeah and it’s like ‘Oh, should I do this?’. Because Rocky? Making a Rocky film. Like Michael B. Jordan goes ‘I wanna direct Creed‘. I go ‘think very carefully about this’ because now you will now have two years of no life and no guarantee that it’s gonna be a hit.”
If you read that with Stallone’s voice in your head, then you’re not the only one. But what he’s saying fits with previous statements he’s made about the potential plot of Rocky VII, along with the information that Michael B. Jordan was interested in directing Creed III himself.
Maybe he’s a little bit jealous that the franchise he created has been ripped away from him and Rocky is now just a background player rather than the marquee star and selling point of the movies, or perhaps the multi-hyphenate filmmaker simply has a great story to tell that fits into the established mythology. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.