Was Jonathan Majors’ ‘Creed III’ character introduced in the first movie?

It’s time to put on our tin-foil hats because we’re about to enter some unexplored fan theory territory when it comes to Jonathan Majors’ character in the upcoming boxing drama Creed III.

The first trailer for the movie, released last week, confirmed once and for all that Majors’ character is not the son of Mr. T’s Clubber Lang from Rocky III. Instead, Majors will play a wholly original character to the Rocky franchise, Damian Anderson, who ties into the upbringing of our protagonist, Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed. As Texas Monthly explained,

“His character, Damian, is tied to the first few minutes of Creed, where we meet Adonis as a child in juvenile detention who spends his time alone in a cell because of his tendency to fight other kids.”

In the Creed films, Adonis is the son of Carl Weathers’ Apollo Creed, the famous rival-turned-buddy of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa. But Adonis was the child that was the result of an affair that Apollo had with a woman named Ms. Johnson. Apollo died before Adonis was born and Ms. Johnson died when Adonis was very young. Thus, Apollo had a rough upbringing bouncing around group homes and going in and out of juvenile detention. It is during this rough childhood that we come to learn Damian knew Adonis.

In the trailer for Creed III, we see a flashback scene in which it looks like Damian and Adonis get into some kind of trouble as kids and are confronted by police on a street corner. Damian then returns to Adonis’ life as an adult, explains that he’s been locked up for 18 years but finally got out, and that he wants to train to become a fighter like Adonis. The trailer makes it seem as if Damian and Donnie were friends back in the day but that the former then becomes driven by envy to eventually become the latter’s enemy in the ring. Presumably, that’s the general plot for Creed III. But were Donnie and Damian straight-up friends as kids or did they have their rough patches from time to time, even back then?

In the aforementioned opening scene of 2015’s Creed, a child-age Adonis gets into a fistfight with another kid in juvenile detention. Perhaps that other kid Adonis was fighting was actually Damian this whole time. It seems entirely possible that Adonis being in that juvenile detention center in the first place may have been from that crime sequence we saw in the Creed III trailer. Plus, Damian also implies in the Creed III trailer that his interest in fighting goes way back, just like Adonis. So perhaps the two actually fought each other.

Adonis later explains to Phylicia Rashad’s Mary Anne Reed, the woman who would later become Adonis’ adoptive mother, that he had fought the other kid for bad-mouthing his deceased biological mother. On the one hand, if Damian and Adonis were truly friends as kids, why would Damian insult Adonis’ mom? On the other hand, maybe we saw a glimpse into a temporary rough patch of their friendship. After all, they may have just been arrested for doing a crime together, so wouldn’t there naturally be tension between them? Plus, an established friendship shared between them would explain why Damian would have enough knowledge about Adonis’ personal life to even insult his mom in the first place, knowing her then-recent passing is a sore spot for him.

If the character we saw fighting Adonis at the beginning of 2015’s Creed as a child truly was the person who would grow up to become Jonathan Majors’ Damian Anderson in Creed III, this would add an interesting layer to their friendship. It would illustrate that, even as kids, there was a bit of rivalry that stewed between them. Now, as adults, all of that tension may just play out in the ring, should this theory ring true. Either way, Damian looks like a formidable opponent for Adonis.

We’ll find out if this theory pans out when Creed III hits theaters on March 3, 2023.