![]() Changing his mind on that and letting Rocky live to fight again was the only correct creative decision he made with this film, a fiasco that would essentially poison the franchise for 16 years. When Sylvester Stallone sat down to write Rocky V, he knew only the ending: In the final fight scene, Rocky would die. We have no doubt you can guess which film is the champ. Only a handful are true knockouts, though a couple of others win on points. With Creed III upon us, we’ve ranked all nine Rocky movies. (They’re a hell of a lot more like us than Iron Man ever was.) And when special effects are running rampant and the fate of the universe always hangs in the balance in comic-book cinema, there’s something incredibly analog-pleasurable about movies where two guys just punch each other. They get older, they make mistakes, they hurt, and they bleed. But the best of the bunch, whether the Rocky sequels or the recent Creed films, find new ways to get us invested - maybe because, unlike in the Marvel and DC flicks, Rocky and Creed are deeply human characters devoid of superpowers. The comforting familiarity of this franchise is both its greatest selling point and its nagging limitation: We watch these movies because we know how they’re going to turn out. It was a formula we loved, until the movies started getting too cheesy, which sent the Philly fighter into cold storage for more than a decade until Rocky Balboa and then Creed brought a radical new view of the iconic prizefighter by shifting the perspective to the son of his early opponent Apollo Creed. For a period in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Rocky sequels were event cinema, dishing out regular installments of a can’t-miss story - Rocky faces a frightening new foe, starts to doubt himself, kicks himself into high gear through a slick training montage, and then squares off with his foe in the ring, emerging triumphant. In our age of larger-than-life superheroes, the humble, hard-punching Italian Stallion feels especially old-fashioned: a beaten-down loser who never stopped believing in himself and eventually took the heavyweight crown while negotiating marriage, family, aging, and loss over the course of several hit sequels. ![]() It has been nearly 50 years since Rocky Balboa first graced the big screen - training for the fight of his life by pounding slabs of frozen meat, balling up his courage to ask out pretty-but-shy Adrian - but in some ways, the beloved character seems even further removed from the realities of the modern multiplex. ![]() Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos: MGM, Shutterstock, United Artists, United International Pictures
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