Sylvester Stallone first played Rocky Balboa 50 years ago this month. Now Anthony Ippolito is playing Stallone in I Play Rocky, a movie about the making of the original that began life without the studio that owns the franchise.
Directed by Peter Farrelly, the film follows Stallone’s hardscrabble push to write Rocky and his insistence on playing the title role himself. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where it was first runner-up for the People’s Choice Award.
It is also the first film from the Rocky universe to come together entirely under Amazon’s ownership, giving Amazon MGM Studios a fresh way to introduce one of its marquee franchises to a new generation. According to screenwriter Peter Gamble, that payoff is exactly why rival studios passed on it.
How a $1 million underdog became a $1.9 billion franchise
Rocky opened in November 1976, earned 10 Academy Award nominations, and won three, including Best Picture. It grossed about $117 million at the domestic box office. Along with The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars, it is often credited with kicking off Hollywood’s blockbuster era of entertaining, grandiose, myth-affirming movies that sparked billion-dollar franchises.
Five sequels followed between 1979 and 2006, then the Creed spinoff trilogy, plus merchandise from action figures to mobile games. For a roughly $1 million movie about a fighter going the distance, Rocky has stayed relevant across generations: the nine films have grossed about $948 million domestically and $1.9 billion worldwide, according to The Numbers.
That library is a big part of what Amazon bought when it agreed to pay $8.45 billion for MGM, home to both Rocky and James Bond. The deal closed in 2022, and MGM now sits inside Amazon MGM Studios. Its parent has since become No. 1 on the 2026 Fortune 500, ending Walmart’s 13-year run at the top.
The franchise has already paid off once for its new owner. Creed III opened to $58.7 million in March 2023, and it held the record for Amazon’s best opening since the MGM deal until Project Hail Mary topped it this year. But Creed III was already in production when the acquisition closed.
A spec script that still needed MGM
I Play Rocky was developed without the studio. Gamble wrote the script on spec; it landed on the Black List, then reached producers Christian Baha and Toby Emmerich and director Farrelly. In 2024, they took it to the Marché du Film at Cannes to court financiers, choosing the independent route over studio financing.
“Technically you can tell a story about Stallone because he’s a public figure, and technically you can show scenes from the film as long as you comment on the scenes,” Gamble told Fortune. “So in theory, you don’t need the rights to Rocky to make this movie, but just because something is technically true doesn’t mean that it’s the smartest thing to do.”
Dramatizing the making of Rocky might have been protected as fair use, but some of the original’s iconography, such as Bill Conti’s unmistakable theme, “Gonna Fly Now,” would have been difficult and expensive to include without MGM’s cooperation. Copyright law is not an exact science, and every reference to the original film would have put the production on a treacherous line.
Distribution posed the same problem, since a movie about the origins of one studio’s franchise was a hard sell to everyone else. “We tried to go to the different studios, but the studios had the problem of ‘If we make this story, it’s going to be advertising another studio’s franchise,'” Gamble explained. “They were kind of like, ‘We don’t know if that’s really the risk we want to take because a lot of the reward goes to someone else. This is really an Amazon MGM project.'”
Introducing Rocky to a new generation
Amazon MGM signed on to distribute the film in 2025, before cameras rolled, which cleared I Play Rocky to borrow from the franchise. The finished film uses Conti’s theme and recreates exact shots from the original.
If it works, the film delivers exactly what rival studios feared: a new generation of Rocky fans for Amazon. It has been nearly 20 years since the last Rocky movie, 2006’s Rocky Balboa, and 11 since Creed hit theaters.
The early numbers are encouraging. I Play Rocky opened on seven screens on Nov. 6 and grossed about $345,000, roughly $49,300 per screen, according to The Numbers. It goes wide on Nov. 20, as Rocky enters its sixth decade.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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