A Million-to-One Shot About a Million-to-One Shot: The First “I Play Rocky” Trailer Lands

There is a particular category of Hollywood legend that sounds invented, and the story of how Rocky got made sits at the very top of it. A broke, unknown actor writes a screenplay in under four days. Producers love it and want to buy it. They offer him money he has never seen in his life, escalating with every meeting, on one condition: somebody else plays the lead. He says no. Repeatedly. For months. And then he wins.

Fifty years later, that story is a movie. The first trailer for I Play Rocky has arrived, with Anthony Ippolito as a young Sylvester Stallone and Peter Farrelly directing for Amazon MGM Studios. It opens in select theaters November 6 and expands later that month, which puts it in theaters almost exactly half a century after the film it is about.

The Real Story Is Almost Too Good to Film

Let me lay out the history, because the details are better than anything a screenwriter would dare make up.

In March 1975, Stallone watched journeyman heavyweight Chuck Wepner go nearly the full fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali, a fight nobody expected to last. He went home and wrote Rocky in about three and a half days. He was broke to a degree that is difficult to overstate, with a bank balance in the low three figures, and he had reportedly already sold his dog Butkus for forty dollars because he could not afford to feed him.

Producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff wanted the script. They also wanted a real actor in it, and the names attached at various points during negotiations included Robert Redford, James Caan, Burt Reynolds, and Ryan O’Neal. The offers climbed into six figures, which for a man with a hundred dollars and no dog was an almost cruel proposition.

He turned it all down. He held the line, took a fraction of the money plus the role, and made the film for roughly a million dollars in twenty-eight days. It became the biggest box office hit of 1976, won Best Picture, and earned Stallone nominations for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay, making him only the third person in history, after Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, to be nominated for acting and writing on the same film.

He also bought the dog back, at a substantially higher price than he sold him for, and put him in the movie.

Ippolito Has Found the Weirdest Niche in Hollywood

Anthony Ippolito previously played Al Pacino in The Offer, the series about the making of The Godfather. He now plays Stallone in a film about the making of Rocky.

That is a genuinely funny career shape. The man has cornered the market on portraying young Italian-American actors becoming stars in 1970s New Hollywood, which is a niche of approximately two roles, and he has both of them. The resemblance is uncanny enough that the casting reads as its own kind of joke, and the trailer suggests he has the voice too, that specific slurred-through-a-mouthful cadence that made Stallone instantly imitable and instantly underestimated.

The Supporting Cast Is the Creation Myth, Fully Populated

The ensemble is where a film like this either earns its keep or turns into a wax museum, and the roster here is promising. Stephan James plays Carl Weathers, the actor who became Apollo Creed. AnnaSophia Robb is Sasha Czack, Stallone’s first wife. Matt Dillon plays his father, Frank Stallone Sr. P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell take on producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, the men on the other side of that negotiating table. Jay Duplass plays John G. Avildsen, who directed Rocky and won an Oscar for it. Tracy Letts and Kiki Seto round things out.

Casting Duplass as Avildsen is an interesting choice, and Dillon as the elder Stallone is inspired. Frank Sr. was, by most accounts, a difficult man, and putting Dillon opposite a young lead in that dynamic suggests the film is not planning to be one long triumphant montage.

Which Brings Us to the Farrelly Question

Here is where I have to be honest about the risk, because it is real.

Peter Farrelly won Best Picture and a screenplay Oscar for Green Book, a film that remains one of the most argued-about winners of the modern era, praised for its warmth and criticized just as loudly for smoothing genuine complexity into something comfortable. His two most recent pictures, Ricky Stanicky and Balls Up, landed with a thud.

An underdog movie about the ultimate underdog movie is the sort of material that can tip into self-congratulation almost effortlessly. The whole thing could curdle into two hours of inspirational sludge, a story about believing in yourself told by a film that believes in itself far too much.

But the counterargument is that this material genuinely is that story, without embellishment, and Farrelly’s actual strength has always been sincerity. The reporting suggests the film has tested extremely well and that Amazon has slotted it into November with awards intentions and a likely fall festival premiere. Crowd-pleasers of this kind live or die on whether they earn the swell. This one at least has the world’s best true story to work with.

One notable absence: Stallone himself is not involved in the production, despite having expressed some interest at one point. A biopic about a living icon, made without him, is a slightly delicate proposition, though it also frees the film from having to flatter its subject.

Fifty Years On

I have spent plenty of time around here on this franchise, including what Creed managed to pull off by tapping into Stallone’s original energy across a gulf of four decades. The reason that character keeps working, through six films, three spinoffs, and now a movie about the movie, is that the story behind it was always the same story as the one on screen. A guy nobody believed in got one shot and refused to blow it.

The trailer is here. November is close. Whether the film lands its punch is an open question, but the story it is telling has been undefeated for fifty years.