In 2015, nine years after he’d reprised Rocky Balboa in the same-named movie following a 16-year absence from the role, Sylvester Stallone returned to the character that made him famous. This time around, though, he wasn’t playing Rocky as the main protagonist, as Creed instead saw Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed filling that position. In fact, originally the plan was for Rocky to die in the spinoff, but Stallone has explained why he nixed that idea immediately.
While I remember speculating, like so many did, that Rocky might die when Creed came out, I didn’t realize director and co-writer Ryan Coogler intended for this to happen in the original script. This was initially why Stallone didn’t want to do Creed, with the actor saying the following while breaking down his most iconic characters with GQ:
I was never comfortable. I dodged that bullet for two years, three years. 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. And I said, ‘I have a big thing about characters like that dying. I’d much rather them get on a train going somewhere and you never see ’em again. But to die it will just bum the audience out completely.’ So once we got over that, I said, ‘Ok, we’ll give it a shot.’
I can see where Sylvester Stallone’s coming from to an extent, especially given how important Rocky Balboa has been to his career, to the point that there’s a movie being made about the making of Rocky. So after dodging Ryan Coogler for several years, eventually he sat down with the filmmaker and voiced his concern with what was going to happen to the Italian Stallion. Coogler was amenable to changing that aspect of the story, so death by Lou Gehrig’s disease was dropped.
Rocky did still experience a health scare during Creed, as he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Fortunately, after initially turning it down, he underwent chemotherapy and started to bounce back by the end of the movie. Funny enough, Stallone accidentally spoiled this portion of Creed in a social media post from December 2014.
Sylvester Stallone reprised Rocky Balboa again in Creed II, but did not return for Creed III. He described his absence in the threequel as “a regretful situation” in November 2022, saying that the then-upcoming movie was “taken in a direction that is quite different than I would’ve taken it.” Stallone has also spent the last few years expressing his displeasure that he doesn’t have the legal rights to the Rocky/Creed franchise, also saying in November 2022 that the deal he signed for the original Rocky was “done unbeknownst to me by people that I thought were close to me and they basically gave away whatever rights I would have had.”
Because of all this, it seems unlikely we’ll ever see Sylvester Stallone play Rocky again, even though there was a time when a seventh Rocky movie was in the works. However, there is a Rocky prequel TV series in the works at Amazon Studios, and a Drago spinoff and Creed IV are also still in development.