Nearly fifty years after a broke actor wrote himself an underdog and refused to sell the script unless he could star in it, the world Sylvester Stallone built out of a Philadelphia boxing gym is expanding in more directions at once than it ever has. There’s a fourth “Creed” on the horizon, a spinoff series about the gym, and — in the strangest and most fascinating twist — an actual movie about the making of the original “Rocky.” The franchise that started with a man running up museum steps is now a full-blown cinematic universe, and the story behind it is as dramatic as anything on screen.
Start with the flagship. Michael B. Jordan has made clear that “Creed IV” is coming, telling anyone who asks that it’s “definitely” on its way, with him back to both star as Adonis Creed and direct, following his confident debut behind the camera on “Creed III.” What’s refreshing is his patience about it. Rather than rush a fourth film to cash in, Jordan has talked about wanting to let the audience “miss it a little bit,” which is a genuinely mature instinct for a franchise that could easily be strip-mined. A realistic timeline puts it a few years out, and honestly, that restraint is a good sign for the quality. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the future direction of the Rocky and Creed franchise, including the behind-the-scenes rights battle.
Nearly fifty years after a broke actor wrote himself an underdog and refused to sell the script unless he could star in it, the world Sylvester Stallone built out of a Philadelphia boxing gym is expanding in more directions at once than it ever has.”
The universe isn’t waiting around, though. A spinoff series centered on the gym itself has been confirmed, extending the world beyond the ring and into the community of fighters, trainers, and dreamers who pass through those doors. It’s a smart way to keep the franchise alive between films, mining the rich supporting-character potential that the “Creed” movies have only started to explore. Boxing stories are, at their core, ensemble stories — every fighter has a corner, a coach, a rival, a family — and a series gives all that room to breathe in a way a two-hour movie can’t.
Then there’s the wild card, and it’s a beauty. A film titled “I Play Rocky” is in the works, chronicling the against-all-odds story of how Stallone fought to make the original 1976 film — refusing to sell his screenplay unless the studio let an unknown, nearly-broke actor play the lead. Anthony Ippolito is set to play a young Stallone in the Peter Farrelly-directed project. It’s a gloriously meta idea: the real underdog story behind the fictional underdog story, the tale of a man who bet everything on himself and won an Oscar for it. If it captures even half the desperation and defiance of that moment, it could be something special.
But every empire has its palace intrigue, and the Rocky-verse has a genuinely thorny one. Sylvester Stallone — the man who created Rocky Balboa, who IS Rocky Balboa to generations of fans — has been openly, bitterly vocal about the fact that he doesn’t own the character. He has feuded publicly with longtime producer Irwin Winkler and his family over the rights, expressing real anguish about having no ownership stake in his own creation. It’s a stark reminder that even the most iconic characters in film history are, at the end of the day, assets on someone else’s balance sheet, and that the men who breathe life into them don’t always get to keep them.
That rights tension casts a long shadow over the question fans care about most: will Rocky himself ever come back? The character is technically still alive in the Creed continuity — he simply stepped out of the picture after the first two “Creed” films. A return isn’t impossible on paper. But given Stallone’s ongoing friction with the people who control the franchise, a Balboa reappearance feels genuinely uncertain, tangled up in legal and personal grievances rather than creative ones. It’s a shame, because the mentor-passes-the-torch dynamic between Rocky and Adonis was the emotional engine of the early “Creed” films.
What’s striking, stepping back, is how durable this whole thing has proven. Boxing movies were supposed to be a dead genre. Stallone somehow kept Rocky relevant across four decades, then pulled off the near-impossible by handing the baton to a new hero in Adonis Creed and launching a second franchise that arguably revitalized the first. Few properties manage one great reinvention; the Rocky-verse has managed several. That it can now support a flagship series of films, a gym-based spinoff, and a self-referential origin movie all at once is a testament to how deep the well runs.
So the underdog keeps swinging. Between “Creed IV” building slowly toward the right moment, a spinoff extending the world, and “I Play Rocky” turning the camera back on the franchise’s own miraculous birth, there’s more Balboa-adjacent storytelling on the way than at any point in the saga’s history. The only sour note is the off-screen fight over who owns the soul of it all — a reminder that the real ring, the one with the lawyers in it, can be just as brutal as the one with the gloves. Either way, the bell keeps ringing, and this franchise refuses to stay down.
What Do You Think? Is Michael B. Jordan right to make audiences wait for “Creed IV,” or has the franchise cooled off enough that it needs to strike now? Would a movie about Sylvester Stallone fighting to make the original “Rocky” work better as an inspiring underdog tale or a cautionary story about the industry? And given his public battle over the character’s rights, do you think we’ll ever actually see Rocky Balboa step back into the ring?
See you on the next binge!
