United Artists
In the new Netflix documentary Sly, which tells the story of Sylvester Stallone’s life and career, the famed Rocky writer and star revealed that the original draft of the script was darker than the one eventually made.
As Stallone recalls in the doc, which was released on Netflix back on October 27, he showed the script — which featured a “thuggish” Rocky Balboa that was inspired by Martin Scorsese’s Mean Street — to a female friend of his and she began crying after reading it.
“She goes, ‘I hate Rocky. I hate him. He’s cruel. He hits people. He beats them up,'” Stallon explains.
“I said, ‘What if you stop short of it?’ Like, maybe he almost did. He could have, that’s his job, but he doesn’t?’ ‘That’d be nice,’” he added. “I said, ‘What if he had a girlfriend or something?’ ‘Yeah, that’s nice.’ So I go back, start writing that: ‘Girlfriend. Nice.’”
The tweaks that Stallone would make to the script were obviously effective as the film gave birth to an iconic American franchise that’s now nine movies deep, but the original 1976 film would go on to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
The most recent film in the Rocky franchise, Creed III, was actually released earlier this year. While Stallone was unfortunately not in the film — he’s got well-documented issues with Rocky producer Irwin Winkler — he did appear in Creed and Creed II and was even nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Award for his work in the former.
In fact, many people believe to this day that Stallone was robbed of the award and should have won over Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies).