United Artists
There are few actors who are as synonymous with a character as Sylvester Stallone is with Rocky Balboa.
There’s Arnold Scwhazangger as Terminator, there’s Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, there’s Heath Ledger as the Joker, and so on and so forth.
But of all those iconic actor-character combos in the last 50 years, there’s arguably none more recognizable than Stallone as Rocky.
As the legendary story goes, Stallone — who was a struggling actor at the time who had to sell his own dog to pay rent — wrote the screenplay of Rocky himself in just four days.
Rocky, now considered to be one of the greatest sports movies of all time, won the Academy Award for Best Picture and spawned a seven-sequel franchise that’s still churning to this day.
However, despite Stallone’s intrinsic connection to the franchise, the iconic star recently said he shockingly has “zero ownership” of the legendary boxing franchise.
In a recent and wide-ranging interview with Variety, Stallone, now 73, revealed that he’s actually never had any ownership of the Rocky property.
“I have zero ownership of Rocky,” Stallone said.
“Every word, every syllable, every grammatical error was all my fault. “It was shocking that it never came to be, but I was told, ‘Hey, you got paid, so what are you complaining about?’ I was furious.”
I mentioned it a few times because after Rocky II came out and made a ton of money and then Rocky III hit and made more than all of them, I said I’d like to have some ownership since I invented it. And that never happened. So I have zero ownership of Rocky.
Given the billion-dollar behemoth that the Rocky has since become, it’s no surprise that Stallone is salty over the way things shook out. Luckily, with a reported net worth of $400 million, we have a feeling that Stallone is still doing just fine.