CREED Sequel Could Bring Rocky and Apollo Together Again

If you enjoyed Creed, which revitalized the Rocky franchise nearly a decade after Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa walked off into the sunset, then you're almost certainly excited about seeing a sequel. I certainly am, but that excitement is directly tied to whether or not co-writer/director Ryan Coogler comes back in that capacity. Stallone gave an update on the sequel to Variety, touching on a bunch of different aspects of what might happen. Let's run through the highlights:

On Coogler's availability (he's currently in negotiations to direct Black Panther):

“I know Ryan is probably going to be gone for a couple years,” Stallone says. “So there will be a quandary on: Do we work with another director and have Ryan produce, or do we wait? There’s a diminishing time acceptance of a sequel. Now they are cranking them out in a year.”

On one version of what would happen in the sequel:

Coogler and Stallone have already developed ideas for the new “Creed.” One version of the story would take place in the past, which would mean — in a surprise that would energize the franchise’s fans — bringing back Carl Weathers to play Apollo Creed, who died in 1985’s “Rocky IV.” “Ryan has some ideas of going forward and backward and actually seeing Rocky and Apollo together,” Stallone revealed. “Think of ‘The Godfather 2.’ That’s what he was thinking of, which was kind of ambitious.”
Coogler is startled to hear that Stallone has already let the cat out of the bag about their plan. “Oh no!” he says with a sigh. “There are no secrets with Sly.”

And their alternate idea:

“You’ll have him [Michael B. Jordan's Adonis Creed] face a different opponent, which I would say is a more ferocious, big Russian,” Stallone says. “You can start to meld my experiences and then you start to bring different cultures into it. And you can see what’s happening with the Russians today in America. The complication will come with [Tessa Thompson's Bianca's] ambition, because she’s not Adrian. She has places to go, things to see, the clock is running on her hearing.”

Rocky IV works as a cheesy attempt to solve the Cold War through cinema, but it's essentially become a joke today, so trying to modernize that story beat by beat in a similar fashion to how Creed modernized the original Rocky seems like a questionable idea. The idea of bringing back Carl Weathers and digitally de-aging him and Stallone so we can see more of their relationship also seems like a dangerous one, because unless it only happens in one scene or something, it sounds like that's going to be a large part of the movie; if those special effects aren't on point, it's just going to ring false and take the audience out of the experience.

We'll have to wait and see what happens with Creed II, but considering how successful it was on a $30 million budget, we'll definitely be stepping back in the ring sooner or later.

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