The Sylvester Stallone Cut Of Rocky IV Is Finished
Sylvester Stallone just finished up the director's cut for Rocky IV and it will soon be an updated version of the boxing classic
This article is more than 2 years old
Sylvester Stallone has played so many roles throughout his many decades in Hollywood. But when it’s all said done, the character he’ll likely be most remembered for is Mr. Rocky Balboa. It’s the role that put him on the map, won him awards, and started a franchise that’s still running in our present day. It’s a testament to the staying power of such an iconic role and Stallone’s ability to inhabit the character from the very beginning. And one of the reasons it’s been such a successful run is that Sylvester Stallone literally never stops working on the character. Recently we got a chance to see that he’s still going back to old movies and touching them up, re-editing them to make them even better all these years later. Check our Stallone’s Instagram feed where he gives us a glimpse of him remastering Rocky IV.
In this clip, Sylvester Stallone takes us into his editing bay where he’s completed work on an updated, director’s cut version of Rocky IV. According to the icon, in his mind the work on a movie is never really completed, you just go about making a new movie out of the old one. It’s such a cool look inside the ring, so to speak, about how Stallone views his work on this character and what it means for each movie to have been done perfectly. He says in the clip that when a director is first making a film, the end comes quickly and you need to rush to finish. That he has the ability, all these years later to go back and do the job he wanted to do the first time around means he’s made this his life’s work.
This Rocky IV director’s cut was supposed to have been completed two years ago but was delayed for unknown reasons. In addition to the fight scenes being updated some, as we see in the post from Sylvester Stallone, Paulie’s “futuristic” robot featured at the beginning was going to be cut out of the film permanently. Good riddance to that thing and it means we can focus more on the story and the classic fight scene at the end.
Rocky IV came almost 36 years ago and had Sylvester Stallone in the starring role while also writing and directing the film as well. While not the best movie in the franchise, it’s one of the most iconic and remembered. It’s the film that saw the death of Apollo Creed at the hands of Ivan Drago. This leads Rocky to travel to Russia to avenge his friend’s death while also basically fighting the Cold War in the ring as well. The boxing scenes are over the top, each fighter would have died many times over if they actually hit like this, but it still serves up a memorable bout and a patriotic ending.
Sylvester Stallone finishing the cut of Rocky IV doesn’t mean the end of the franchise. Far from it. We still have another Creed movie in the pipeline with Michael B. Jordan in the lead. And Stallone himself even hinted that he was working on a Rocky prequel television series that would follow the characters in a timeline before that first fight. So there’s still plenty to come in addition to this updated movie version.
