Sylvester Stallone has played many famous characters in his decorated acting career, but one of the most iconic is, arguably, Robert “Rocky” Balboa.
Stallone played the boxer, known as The Italian Stallion, in six films of his own franchise, and the actor went on to reprise the role in the creed spin-offs that starred Michael B. Jordan as Adonis “Donnie” Creed.
While Stallone portrayed Rocky in the first two creed films, which were released in 2015 and 2018 respectively, he does not return for CreedIII, which is coming out in theaters on Friday, March 3.
Here’s everything you need to know about why.
In creed II, Stallone’s Rocky acts as a mentor to Donnie once again as the boxer prepares for his biggest fight yet, against Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu) the son of Rocky’s former rival Ivan (Dolph Lundgren).
At the end of the film, Rocky chooses to take a step back and he travels to Vancouver where he can reconcile with his own son Robert Jr. (Milo Ventimiglia), and also meet his grandson Logan (Robbie Johns).
Creed III follows Jordan’s Donnie as he is forced to face a person from his past: Damian “Dame” Anderson (Jonathan Majors).
Dame was his childhood friend and also a boxing prodigy, but his dreams in the sport were destroyed when he was sent to prison for 18 years. Now he is out, Dame wants to take it all and Donnie must come out of retirement to face him.
Despite Donnie’s daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent) playing a pivotal role in CreedIII, her godfather Rocky does not make an appearance, and the boxer is only mentioned by name once in the film.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to fans, though, because in April 2021, Stallone announced that he would not appear in the film. He does, however, continue to act as a producer for the boxing drama.
Although Stallone does not appear in Creed III the actor is still very keen to work on new stories within the franchise, but there has been some issues in doing so because the actor does not own the rights despite writing the original 1976 film and creating the character.
Although Stallone is credited for creating the characters from Rocky it is Irwin Winkler who owns the rights to both the Rocky and Creed franchises. This has resulted in the actor feuding publicly over the direction the franchise has been taken in.
In March 2021, Stallone posted a teaser of his ideas for a rocky prequel on Instagram. Sharing two pages of notes on what it could be, Stallone wrote in the caption: “This may be the strangest posting yet. I started out this morning by writing a treatment for a Rocky prequel For streaming.
“Ideally 10 episodes for a few seasons to really get to the heart of the Characters in there younger years – Here is a small portion of how my creative writing process starts…Hope it happens – And then I needed to clear my head so I went fishing… Talk about extremes! Keep punching my friends.”
Despite his hopes for the prequel, it has remained in limbo. But, in November 2022, Stallone shared an update on the prequel series and said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporters that, despite the rights issue, the show is “pretty close” to being secured by Prime Video.
He said: “It may happen again because now Amazon’s involved. It’s pretty close. There’s a side of me that goes: Is this really going to work?
“Every time you try to do Son of Kong, Son of Tarzan, it doesn’t work. There’s a certain indescribable formula that happens. If I gave you the novel the godfather, good luck on casting that today. Good luck selling that whole premise today.”
The actor’s feud came to a head when news of a potential spin-off based on the character Drago was announced, with Winkler and Lundgren involved, per a report from Variety in July 2022.
In a now-deleted Instagram post shared after this new broke, Stallone hit back at Winkler and said that he felt the characters were being “exploited” for profit.
By Entertainment Weeklyhe said: “Another Heartbreaker… Just found this out… ONCE AGAIN, this PATHETIC 94-year-old PRODUCER and HIS MORONIC USELESS VULTURE CHILDREN, Charles And David, are once again picking clean THE BONES of another wonderful character I created without even telling me.
“I APOLOGIZE to the FANS, I never wanted ROCKY characters to be exploited by these parasites. By the way, I have nothing but respect for Dolph but I wish HE had told me what was going on behind my back. Keep your REAL friends close .”
Lundgren responded to Stallone’s remarks in his own Instagram post, in which he wrote: “Just to set the record straight regarding a possible Drago spinoff. There’s no approved script, no deals in place, no director and I was personally under the impression that my friend Sly Stallone was involved as a producer or even as an actor. There was a press leak last week which was unfortunate. In touch with Mr Balboa – just so all the fans can relax…There ya go”
In November 2022, Stallone also spoke on not owning the rights to rocky on SiriusXM’s Pop Culture Spotlight with Jessica Shaw.
Of Winkler, he said: “You can’t make peace with someone who’s been so, so nefarious in my, in my opinion.”
He explained that if he wanted to make anything in the rocky franchise then he has to request permission from Winkler.
