Sylvester Stallone is everywhere this week, and so is one sentence. Asked about returning as Rocky Balboa, he said he would make Creed 4 with Michael B. Jordan “as long as the other fellow is not involved.” A repost of the clip on X passed 1.8 million views in a day. In the same clip he is asked whether he could ever bring himself to watch Creed III. His answer: “Never.”
Two things are worth knowing. The clip is not new. It comes from a SiriusXM interview with Jessica Shaw that was already being reported in March 2023. And the other fellow is Irwin Winkler, now 95, who has produced every Rocky and Creed film and controls the character alongside the studio. Stallone, who invented Rocky Balboa, owns none of it. In that same sitdown he said of Winkler’s control, “which means I have to beg him.”
It started with a real fight. On March 24, 1975, Chuck Wepner, a club fighter from Bayonne, New Jersey, went into the 15th round with Muhammad Ali. Stallone watched, went home, and wrote the script in three and a half days with $106 to his name. Wepner later sued him over the use of his story, and the case was settled in 2006.
The offers for the script climbed as high as $360,000, with the studio picturing Ryan O’Neal or Burt Reynolds in the lead. Stallone refused to sell unless he played the part. He told the story again last month on CBS Sunday Morning: “I have paid my dues, and I know this is it.”
His new memoir adds a detail that explains why he held the line. He had already sold the rights to an earlier script, Paradise Alley, for a hundred dollars, and he writes that he feared he had blown his chance with Chartoff and Winkler by “giving in like a coward.” He was not going to sell himself short twice.
What he was actually paid gets mangled online, so here is Stallone’s own accounting, given to Variety in 2019. He said he received $35,000 for the first film, most of it for the screenplay, plus 10 net points. Of those points he said, “It was probably the first and last time anyone ever saw those pay off.” They brought his total to about $2.5 million. The $75,000 figure that gets attached to the original was his fee for Rocky II. He made $120,000 up front on Rocky III, plus millions on the back end.
What he never got was equity. The film was financed by United Artists and produced by Winkler and Robert Chartoff, who have said they put up their own homes to guarantee the budget. The rights stayed with the producers and the studio, which is now Amazon MGM. Stallone has said that when he pushed for a stake after the sequels took off, his own attorney told him the studio would never agree. He put it plainly to Variety: “I have zero ownership of Rocky.”
One correction to the legend. Stallone did not sit in his seat while the producers collected Best Picture in 1977. Winkler has recalled pulling him onstage at a time when only producers accepted the award.
The franchise kept growing. Nine films later, the series has grossed more than $1.9 billion worldwide, according to The Numbers. Stallone was paid well as it grew. When the feud went public, Variety reported that Winkler was surprised by the complaint, and a source said Stallone made more than $10 million on each of the first two Creed films. In that post, Stallone explained what the money did not fix: “I wanted to leave something of Rocky for my children.”
He almost was not in Creed at all. Ryan Coogler’s original script had Rocky dying, and Stallone kept saying no. “I dodged that bullet for two years, three years,” he told GQ last year. The script changed, he signed on, and the role earned him a second Oscar nomination for playing the same character.
It boiled over in July 2022. Stallone posted a drawing of Winkler as a serpent and asked for a piece of his rights back, writing that the issue “eats at my soul.” He framed it as a modest ask: “I believe That would be a FAIR gesture from this 93 year old gentleman.” Winkler was 91 at the time.
Days later, word broke that MGM was developing a Drago spinoff. Stallone said nobody had told him and answered with a post that ended, “RETURN MY RIGHTS BLOODSUCKERS!” He also described Winkler as “remarkably untalented and parasitical.”
Dolph Lundgren replied that there was no approved script and no deals in place, and that he had assumed Stallone was involved. The two patched it up.
That November, Stallone told The Hollywood Reporter the rights were never coming back and that the original deal was made without his understanding of the business. “Who knew Rocky would go on for another 45 years?” he said.
As for Creed 4, the series has already shown it can move without him. Creed III went ahead in 2023 and grossed $276 million worldwide, the best of the three. That November, Winkler said at a Deadline event that Creed IV was being planned with Jordan directing again. It remains in development with no release date, and Winkler is still attached. Stallone has always been careful to say his problem is not with Jordan.
There is a reason he is everywhere right now. Stallone turned 80 in July, and Rocky turns 50 on November 21. His memoir, The Steps, was published September 29 by William Morrow. It runs from his arrival in New York in 1969 to the 1977 Academy Awards, which means it ends just before the ownership story begins.
Next comes I Play Rocky, the Peter Farrelly film about the making of the original, with Anthony Ippolito as Stallone. It opens in November from Amazon MGM, the same studio that holds Rocky. Stallone was not involved beyond speaking with Farrelly, but he likes it. “How strange is this? A movie about me being in a movie,” he told the Associated Press. Season four of Tulsa King arrives on Paramount+ on October 16.
So the man who would not sell his script without the lead role is spending the anniversary telling the story of how he got the part. The story of who got the paper is the one that keeps going viral. Anyone who has spent time around boxing knows the difference between the name on the poster and the name on the contract.
