As Sylvester Stallone’s most iconic character hands the baton to Michael B. Jordan in the movie theater this week with the release of Creed, we’re taking time to reflect on the incredible, decades-spanning saga of Rocky Balboa.
With, now, seven turns as Philadelphia’s most beloved (fictional) star under his belt, Stallone has transformed time and time again for the big screen ring (as well as other roles). The journey has taken the actor from an impoverished wannabe-screenwriter to thriving member of Hollywood’s elite. Aside from the obvious damage done to Stallone’s body due to an insistence on authenticity, the franchise has been a life-changing experience for the star, and one with many interesting stories.
While fans of the series may have favorites among the six movies, each, without a doubt, comes with its own interesting crop of behind-the-scenes tales.
So, cue up “Gonna Fly Now,” sit back, and take a trip through thirty years of botched fights and could-have-beens. Here’s what you didn’t know about the Rocky films.
1. Stallone wrote Rocky in three and a half days. Really.
A fact so unbelievable that it’s almost developed a mythic status. In 1975, Stallone was a poor married man with a baby on the way and $106 dollars in the bank. His Hollywood apartment was rundown and the rent was late. What’s a guy to do. Pen an Oscar-winning film, right? Right. Write it in three and a half days? Sure.
After watching that year’s championship fight between Chuck Wepner and Muhammad Ali in a movie theatre, Stallone was struck by (literally) a million dollar idea.
“I said to myself, ‘Let’s talk about stifled ambition and broken dreams and people who sit on the curb looking at their dreams go down the drain,’ ” Stallone told The New York Times. “I thought about it for a month. That’s what I call my inspiration stage. Then I let it incubate for 10 months, the incubation stage. Then came the verification stage, when I wrote it in 3 1/2 days.”
Stallone woke up every morning (for those long three days) at 6 a.m. and put BIC pen to lined paper. His wife, Sasha, served as the transcriber, pecking away at the typewriter.
“She kept saying, ‘You’ve gotta do it, you’ve gotta do it. Push it, Sly, go for broke.,’ ” Stallone said. Nothing like American ingenuity.
2. Budget issues led to many of Rocky‘s memorable moments.
Rocky was granted only a $1 million dollar budget when it was greenlit, so cuts were made when they had to be. This meant any production mistakes were often simply incorporated into the script. Rather than spend money on remaking scenes because of costumes or set errors, Stallone used them to reflect Rocky’s own dire situation.
Some big examples include Rocky and Adrian’s iconic first date, wherein he bribes a janitor to allow them to ice skate on a deserted rink. Stallone originally intended for the scene to be shot during the rink’s regular business hours, but paying all the extras required would have been a budget buster. Alas, the date was rewritten to explain why they were alone.
Another example is the promotional poster for Rocky hanging above the ring before his fight against Apollo Creed. In the illustration, Rocky is wearing the wrong color shorts (red with a white stripe, rather than white with a red one). The prop department error would be costly to fix, so instead, a line was added in which Rocky addressed the faux pas.
The same goes for his robe, which was made too baggy for Stallone. The timing didn’t allow for a fix, so the actor used it as a way to address the low expectations fight organizers had for the character.
3. Rocky ran around 30 miles in the second film’s training montage.
A (very dedicated) writer at Philadelphia magazine was struck by how absurd Rocky’s extensive training route was in the 1979 film, and decided to explore just how long the boxer’s run was.
Jumping from Southern Philly to the city’s Italian Market, and then, to Northern Philly in seemingly moments, Rocky’s path is a little unrealistic. In only a few minutes, he travels from the B Street Bridge at East Gurney to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
Using the USA Track and Field distance-measuring tool, the author discovered that from Rocky’s home to the Art Museum steps, accounting for all the highlighted neighborhoods in the montage, the character traveled an impressive 30.61 miles. For reference, that’s 4.41 miles longer than a marathon.
4. Bette Midler could have been Adrian.
The beloved chanteuse, or, as she’s been recently known, Britt Meddler, nearly had Talia Shire’s most iconic role.
Midler told Roger Ebert in a 1980 interview that her then-manager had turned down the supporting part of Adrian a few years prior.
“I’d still like to work with Sylvester Stallone,” Midler said. “There’s something about those beefy Italians that turns me on. But when he sent over the Rocky screenplay, my manager told me it was a nice role, a nice movie, but not for me. When I saw Rocky, I was really sad that I’d lost the chance to play that girl.”
(Check out some of the other stars who were almost in Rocky, here.)
5. Stallone had a shockingly low body fat percentage after training for Rocky III .
Stallone has always kept lean – obviously, as most of his most famous roles called for someone in perfect male form. During Rocky III though, the star said his body fat was so low it was at least 15 percent less than what is recommended for healthy men.
The actor has said that he weighed only 155 pounds. and had a body fat percentage of 2.8 percent when they started making the movie. Again, the normal number for adult males is much higher – around 18-25 percent.
6. Dolph Lundgren sent Stallone to the intensive care unit while filming Rocky IV.
Stallone wanted authenticity when filming the Rocky IV fight scenes with Dolph Lundgren, who portrayed the massive Ivan Drago, so he asked the actor to punch him for real.
The actual sparring, however, nearly took Stallone’s life. The star said one of Lundgren’s hits actually slammed his heart against his breastbone, causing the heart to swell and his beating to become labored.
“In the first round, I thought these two characters should hate each other so much that they should just attack each other like pit dogs… professionalism be damned,” Stallone revealed during a Q&A. “So what you see in the first twenty seconds is real, and after the third take of taking body blows, I felt a burning in my chest, but ignored it.”
Stallone said after suffering breathing difficulty later that night he was taken to the emergency room with a blood pressure of over 200. “The next thing I knew I was on a low-altitude flight from Canada to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and there I resided in intensive care for eight days.”
Without the medical attention, Stallone said doctors told him that his heart would’ve continued to swell until it stopped.
7. Adrian was alive in the original script for Rocky Balboa.
The final Rocky film (until Creed, that is) was meant to be an answer to the universally-panned Rocky V. While Stallone is still in top form as the aging boxer in the 2006 flick, one key component of the long franchise was missing: Adrian.
As the character explained on screen, his beloved wife’s life had been taken by “woman cancer.” That wasn’t initially Stallone’s intention, however.
“In the original script [for Rocky Balboa], she was alive,” Stallone told USA Today. “But it just didn’t have the same dramatic punch. I thought, ‘What if she’s gone?’ That would cut Rocky’s heart out and drop him down to ground zero.”
To account for the 16-year gap between films, Stallone and co-star Burt Young, who reprised his role as Paulie, said they needed a plot-driving back story.
“Adrian’s probably more prevalent by not being in this movie than if she was,” Young told the paper.
8. Stallone flattened one of his knuckles while filming the meat locker scenes in Rocky.
Rocky’s use of a meat locker for training in the first movie actually had a lifelong impact on Stallone’s hands.
Stallone said that during filming, he and the crew spent approximately 14 hours in the meat house. Although his trainer taped the actor’s hands in a way to protect from broken bones while punching the animal carcasses, Stallone said the bandages were ineffective.
“After eight hours, the cold penetrated the bandages and hitting the meat finally caused a cracked knuckle and drove it back into the middle of my hand,” he said. “To this day, I still haven’t seen it. But again, it was worth it. Hell, I’ve still got nine other knuckles.”
9. Those Rocky IV Russian training scenes were actually in Wyoming.
Rocky IV, the highest grossing sports film until 2009’s The Blind Side, was (unsurprisingly) not filmed in the then-Soviet Union where most of the action was set. Where did they film all those picturesque, snowy training scenes? In America! Producers chose Wyoming’s popular ski destination, Jackson Hole, as the Siberian countryside. The area, which sits at the base of the Grand Teton National Park, was then still home to Mormon Row, a group of original cabins built by settlers in the late 1800s.
While none of the original structures were used for filming, a cabin in the same style as the Mormon homes was erected as the site of Rocky’s extensive preparation for his Christmas Day fight.
The Rocky IV cabin is no longer standing, but it did inspire one real famous athlete’s own training regimen. Swimmer Michael Phelps said he grew up watching the 1985 film, and, thus, his own “dojo” was built in a similar style.
The Olympic champion said the basic wooden cabin once sat in the corner of the Baltimore swim club he trained at before the 2012 London games, and inside he would do pull ups before sparring with partners.
10. Stallone wanted Rocky to die in the fifth film.
Stallone was ready to axe the beloved boxer way back in 1990 (and thank goodness he didn’t). The star’s original script had him passing away after being severely beaten in the ring by Tommy Morrison’s Tommy Gunn, according to director John Alvidson.
“At the end of the movie he is on the way to hospital, his head is in Adrian’s lap and he dies because he’s taken this great beaten from Tommy Gunn,” Avildsen said. “And the last scene of the movie, Adrian comes out of the hospital and there’s the world press assembled because Rocky then is a big deal and she announces that he is dead, but as long as people believe in themselves Rocky spirit will live forever.”
Alvidson said he was on board for the more dramatic finale, but after the movie began shooting, the studio head changed his mind. “They said, ‘Oh by the way Rocky’s not going to die. Batman doesn’t die, Superman, James Bond, these people don’t die.’ ”
11. Hulk Hogan was fired from the WWF for taking the role of Thunderlips.
Taking on the role of Thunderlips in Rocky III was, in the long run, probably one of the best things that ever happened to Hulk Hogan’s career. At the time, however, the casting proved disastrous.
WWF head Vince McMahon, Sr. was so annoyed at Hogan for joining the film that he was fired from the Federation. The axe led him to the American Wrestling Association, a move that allowed his fan base and prominence to grow even stronger as many wanted to cheer on the big screen villain.
Eventually, when Vince MacMahon, Jr. took over the WWF as CEO in 1982, Hogan’s place among the lineup of wrestlers was reinstated.
And now, 33 years later, Hogan has been scrubbed from the WWF again. This time, however, the organization’s logic is a little more reasonable.
