Sylvester Stallone Goes Off on Producer and His "Moronic Vulture Children" for Ruining Rocky
Sylvester Stallone is pissed at rumors of an Ivan Drago spinoff that he wasn’t told about. He unleashed his anger, in some now-deleted Instagram posts, at producer Irwin Winkler, who owns the rights to the Rocky franchise, writing that Winkler and his “moronic vulture children are picking clean the bones” of another character he created:
This is an interesting scenario and the reason why owning your work nowadays is becoming an important sticking point for creators, comedians, and artists. Comedian Andrew Schultz just bought his special back from Amazon because they wanted him to delete some jokes, so instead he chose to release it himself. Sylvester Stallone was a nobody when he wrote and starred in Rocky. He sold the script for $75k and 10 net points and only made $2.5 million off a film that won Best Picture. Back then you couldn’t get your movie made in Hollywood without signing your life away to studios.
Now I’m not going to shed any tears for Stallone, because the dude has made hundreds of millions off the back of Rocky and it launched him into superstardom. He could also be unhappy he’s being left out of Creed 3. But if you’re fired up about this, you can sign the Change.org petition, started definitely by someone who hasn’t gone past Washington Ave in 30 years. It has 1.3k signatures and calls for Stallone to have full creative control over the Rocky franchise. It’ll do about as much as me creating a petition for Sydney Sweeney to go on a date, but we do kind of owe it to Stallone since he promised to never come back to the Linc because of the Rocky jinx.