The 2015 scene Sylvester Stallone wouldn’t shoot under any circumstances: “I didn’t want to do it”
Even though his career has been through its fair share of peaks and valleys, Sylvester Stallone still carries enough cache as a veteran Hollywood legend to put his foot down as and when required.
If there’s something he really, really doesn’t want to do, then he’ll fight his corner, no matter who the director is. When he found himself at one of those crossroads, he refused to budge, got his way, and proved to critics and audiences alike that he’d made the right call in not backing down.
Had Stallone shown that much determination when it came to every movie, then we might have been spared some of the unadulterated shite that he’s made over the years. If anything, it’s remarkable that he’s still a star, considering he’s headlined some of the worst films known to humanity.
While you can not inaccurately suggest that he’s been dining out on Rocky‘s success for the last half-century, that doesn’t make it any less impressive that the guy who thought it would be a good idea to make Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, D-Tox, Oscar, Backtrace, and Driven is still a pretty big deal.
For a while, though, it looked like his signature character had been sent to the glue factory. Rocky V was a terrible way to bring the curtain down on the once-mighty franchise, only for Rocky Balboa to resurrect the ‘Italian Stallion’ a decade and a half later. A decade after that, Ryan Coogler had an idea.
Admittedly, it was an idea that Stallone hated, since one of the main story points for his initial pitch for Creed was to have Philadelphia’s greatest fictional pugilist killed off at the midway point, spurring Michael B Jordan’s Adonis Creed on to glory by honouring both his late father and recently deceased mentor.
However, he wasn’t having any of it. “I dodged that bullet for two years, three years,” Stallone explained. “And Ryan Coogler was very persistent, kept pushing it. And we had the same agent, but I didn’t want to do it, because the way he had written it, Rocky dies. He gets Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
He wouldn’t sign off on the script because he felt that Rocky’s death would “bum the audience out completely,” which it would. Coogler agreed to his request, and while the character is diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he doesn’t die, and even stuck around for the sequel.
In the end, Creed would launch a spinoff saga and earn Stallone his first Academy Award nomination in 40 years for a touching supporting performance, so you can’t say he was wrong to demand that Rocky lived to fight another day. Still, it was a short-lived renaissance, with the Rocky brand currently on his shit-list.
