‘I Play Rocky’ writer says rival studios balked at ‘advertising another studio’s franchise’
“We tried to go to the different studios, but the studios had the problem of ‘If we make this story, it’s going to be advertising another studio’s franchise,'” Gamble explained.
- It is also the first film from the Rocky universe to come together entirely under Amazon’s ownership, giving Amazon MGM Studios a fresh way to introduce one of its marquee franchises to a new generation.
- If it works, the film delivers exactly what rival studios feared: a new generation of Rocky fans for Amazon.
- How a $1 million underdog became a $1.9 billion franchise Rocky opened in November 1976, earned 10 Academy Award nominations, and won three, including Best Picture.
Now Anthony Ippolito is playing Stallone in I Play Rocky, a movie about the making of the original that began life without the studio that owns the franchise.
This is really an Amazon MGM project.'” Introducing Rocky to a new generation Amazon MGM signed on to distribute the film in 2025, before cameras rolled, which cleared I Play Rocky to borrow from the franchise.
- A spec script that still needed MGM I Play Rocky was developed without the studio.
- Distribution posed the same problem, since a movie about the origins of one studio’s franchise was a hard sell to everyone else.
- For a roughly $1 million movie about a fighter going the distance, Rocky has stayed relevant across generations: the nine films have grossed about $948 million domestically and $1.9 billion worldwide, according to The Numbers.
- According to screenwriter Peter Gamble, that payoff is exactly why rival studios passed on it.
- Directed by Peter Farrelly, the film follows Stallone’s hardscrabble push to write Rocky and his insistence on playing the title role himself.
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