Rocky: 10 Reasons The Sequels Could Never Top The Original - Screen Rant

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Sylvester Stallone became a star overnight with his breakout hit Rocky, the quintessential underdog story about a small-time boxer who’s given the chance to fight the heavyweight champion as a publicity stunt. The unexpected box office success of Rocky launched a lucrative long-running franchise, but none of the sequels ever topped their legendary predecessor.

The spin-off Creed series has been receiving better reviews than the Rocky sequels did, because the Michael B. Jordan movies have recaptured the passion and emotional engagement of the original masterpiece. But the mainline Rocky sequels always struggled to match the greatness of the first one.

10 The First Movie Came From Sylvester Stallone’s Heart

Sylvester Stallone’s Oscar-nominated script for Rocky came straight from his heart. He funneled the frustrations of being a struggling actor through the tale of a struggling boxer.

The emotions that Stallone was feeling at the time – trying to have his voice heard, forced to make difficult decisions due to financial troubles, worried about the future etc. – all fed into the Rocky screenplay to give it a raw passion that was missing from the sequels.

9 The Sequels Are Boxing Movies, But The First One Is A Love Story

Although Rocky is often called the greatest boxing movie of all time, it’s not really about boxing. It’s about a boxer, but the story isn’t about the sport. As Rocky is challenged to a fight with Apollo Creed and begins training, boxing slips into the background as Rocky and Adrian’s love story takes the spotlight.

The whole point of Rocky is that the title character doesn’t care when the fight is called in Creed’s favor; he just cares about Adrian. The sequels each introduced a new opponent and a new training montage and focused more on the boxing over the romance.

8 The Original Called Back To Frank Capra’s Classics

When Rocky was first released, it was compared to the work of Frank Capra. Later critics would call these comparisons invalid, because Rocky is too sentimental to live up to the more cynical side of Capra’s films.

Both arguments are valid, but while Rocky may not be 100% Capra-esque, it certainly has the old-timey Hollywood charm of a Capra movie.

7 Rocky Was At His Most Three-Dimensional In The Original

Rocky Balboa has never been a one-dimensional role and Sylvester Stallone has never phoned in a performance in the role, always bringing plenty of pathos to the iconic fighter, but he was definitely at his most three-dimensional in the original movie.

Stallone’s script for the original movie has a much longer first act than the average Hollywood screenplay, but it works spectacularly. He uses it to round out Rocky as a character before the plot gets into full swing and his personal life gets lost in the fray of the second-act developments. With a longer first act to introduce Rocky, the movie makes the audience care about him and ultimately root for him when he’s booked to take on the champ.

6 The Sequels Revolved Around Rocky’s Fame, Which Isn’t Relatable

Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in Rocky

Sylvester Stallone has said that the story of Rocky Balboa has closely followed his own. The problem with that is that, after the release of the first Rocky movie, the story of Sylvester Stallone has been that he’s one of the most famous actors in the world.

All the Rocky sequels, especially the later ones, were about Rocky’s fame, which isn’t anywhere near as relatable as the underdog conflict of the first movie.

5 The Original Had Authentic Grit

Where contemporary critics condemned Rocky for supposedly sentimentalizing crime with its depiction of Rocky’s side gig as a loan shark, today’s critics praise it for its authentic grit and honest portrait of financial struggle.

Rocky doesn’t take work as a loan shark in the early days of his career because he’s a bad guy; he has to take those jobs to make ends meet.

4 Apollo Creed Was The Ultimate Opponent For Rocky Balboa

From Mr. T as Clubber Lang to Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago, every Rocky sequel has a villain with a huge advantage over the Italian Stallion, played by a memorable “guest star” of sorts, and while some of those villains have become icons in their own right, Apollo Creed is still Rocky’s ultimate opponent in terms of theme and character.

Rocky is used as a pawn to boost Creed’s career. The odds are stacked massively against Rocky, literally. The only person who takes Rocky seriously as a contender in the fight is himself (and Adrian, Paulie, and Mickey, of course).

3 The Sequels Doubled Down On The Schmaltz

The first Rocky movie is often regarded as a schmaltz-fest – and compared to other Hollywood films of that era, like Taxi Driver and The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, it is pretty schmaltzy – but it never becomes too sickly sweet that it’s unrealistic or unengaging.

But where the original movie presented a bleak working-class reality with glimmers of sweetness in its hero’s love life, the sequels doubled down on the schmaltz, sometimes to unbearable levels.

2 One Man’s Search For Happiness Was Universally Relatable

Audiences don’t have to be interested in boxing to enjoy Rocky. At its core, it’s a simple story about one man’s pursuit of happiness, and the cost of that happiness and his realization of his own misconceptions about what will make him happy.

The Rocky sequels do require an interest in the boxing side of things, because the themes and motivations of their stories aren’t as universal as the first movie.

1 The Original Already Perfected The Formula

The reason why Rocky seems so clichéd now is the same reason why Lethal Weapon and National Lampoon’s Vacation feel clichéd today – they created all the clichés. They all originated a formula for a movie subgenre (underdog sports movies, buddy cop movies, and road movies, respectively) that has since been copied over and over again with diminishing returns.

The Rocky sequels failed to live up to the original for the same reason all its copycats failed to live up to it. All those movies were imitating a formula that Rocky perfected the first time.

NEXT: Rambo: 10 Reasons The Sequels Could Never Top First Blood

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Ben Sherlock (2141 Articles Published)

Ben Sherlock is a writer, comedian, and independent filmmaker, and he's good at at least two of those things. In addition to writing for Screen Rant and Comic Book Resources, covering everything from Scorsese to Spider-Man, Ben directs independent films and does standup comedy. He's currently in pre-production on his first feature film, Hunting Trip, and has been for a while because filmmaking is expensive. Previously, he wrote for Taste of Cinema and BabbleTop.