A Film About Refusing a Fortune Premieres at TIFF, and Nobody Can Say What the Fortune Was

Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky world-premieres in Toronto's Special Presentations on 12 September, with Anthony Ippolito as Sylvester Stallone. Amazon MGM opens it in select US theatres on 6 November — moved up from 13 November, a change much of the press has not caught — and wide later that month, timed to Rocky's fiftieth anniversary on 21 November.

Amazon's own logline: "an unknown actor with an unshakable belief that he wasn't just meant to write Rocky — he was meant to be Rocky Balboa."

Two accounts, and they are not quite incompatible

In September 2025, promoting his memoir, Stallone said he was blindsided:

"I was shocked to read [about] it. I have zero to do with it. Since I lived it, I thought I might be able to participate and give them some insight."

Seven months later, Farrelly answered at length:

"I've read this a couple of times, and that's not accurate… the first thing we did was reach out. First of all, that was another script that a guy named Peter Gamble wrote… So they sent it to Stallone. He read it. And then I met with him at the Beverly Hills Hotel in LA. I said, 'Hey, what do you think? I'm not gonna make it if you don't give me the thumbs up.' And he goes, 'Great. Do it.' So we did it. But I guess along the way, he must have forgotten."

Read them carefully and they can both be true. Farrelly claims a script approval and one meeting. Stallone claims no participation and no consultation on the substance. Those are different things.

Farrelly's explanation for the confusion is that Stallone was writing his memoir at the time — and the dates support the mechanism. I Play Rocky was announced at Cannes on 7 May 2024. Five weeks later, on 11 June, Stallone sold The Steps, a memoir named for the museum steps, to William Morrow in a heated auction for a reported seven figures. Both men spent 2024 and 2025 building the same origin story for different buyers.

By late July 2026 Stallone had softened, posting the trailer with: "Every story has a beginning and I'm excited to see this one brought to life. Congratulations to the cast and crew of I Play Rocky. Keep punching."

What is certain: Stallone holds no credit on the film. Not executive producer, not producer, not consultant. And Farrelly's rebuttal, unusually, was picked up almost nowhere — no trade carried it.

The refusal at the centre of the film has no price

This is the part that should give any writer pause, because it is the entire dramatic engine. Stallone turning down life-changing money for the script. Here is every published version:

• $150,000 — "even when the bidding hit $150,000 he held strong."
• $180,000, rising to $360,000 — producers offering him money "to stay home."
• $265,000 — a headline figure from a viral 2023 cycle, citing no datable interview.
• "More than $300,000" — the same newspaper that had published $360,000, three years later.
• "Six-figure deals," plural — Variety, declining to be specific.
• "Serious money" — Deadline, in its own fiftieth-anniversary interview with Stallone in May 2026, which put no number on it at all.

The one figure everyone agrees on is $20,000 — and that is what he was paid for the script, plus $625 a week to act. It is regularly misfiled as what he refused.

And then the detail that should end the argument: $150,000 is, in the 1976 film, exactly what promoter George Jergens offers Rocky Balboa to fight Apollo Creed. A number from inside the screenplay has migrated into the story about the screenplay.

The only hard figure is the one both Deadline and El País carry independently: Stallone had $106 when he refused.

How Rocky actually got made

Stallone wrote it in three days, inspired by Chuck Wepner lasting nearly fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali. Henry Winkler — his Lords of Flatbush co-star, then at peak Happy Days fame — took the script to ABC, who bought it and wanted a different writer; Winkler used his clout to buy the rights back and return them.

United Artists wanted a star. Redford, Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds and James Caan were all floated. What got it made was a contractual quirk: Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff could greenlight a project unilaterally if the budget stayed low enough, and they collateralised potential losses against another picture — whose eventual losses Rocky ended up covering. The executives who finally approved Stallone had, by his own account, mistakenly thought he was Perry King.

Budget: $1,075,000, cut down from a proposed $6 million. Advertising spend: $4.2 million, four times the negative cost. The purest underdog film ever made was sold like a studio picture.

Shooting began 9 January 1976. Stallone says 24 days; other accounts say the studio's condition was 28. His father rings the bell in the film because there was no money for an actor. His brother is the street-corner singer. His first wife took the stills. The ice-rink date was shot in an empty rink after hours because they could not afford daytime extras. The mismatched shorts on the fight poster were a props error nobody could afford to reshoot, so Avildsen wrote a line about it instead. Bill Conti got the composing job partly because the entire music budget was $25,000 — fee, musicians, studio and tape.

It grossed roughly $225 million worldwide and won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Film Editing from ten nominations. Stallone was nominated for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay and lost both. Paddy Chayefsky, who beat him for Network, had approached him beforehand, by Stallone's telling: "You're new in this town. First of all, your screenplay is never going to win… Because I'm the president of The Writers Guild, and mine is going to win."

The director's own record is the second story here

Green Book premiered at TIFF on 11 September 2018, won the People's Choice Award and then Best Picture — three Oscars from five nominations, $321.8 million worldwide on a $23 million budget. Farrelly personally won two. He was not nominated for Best Director; Green Book is one of only five films ever to win Best Picture without a directing nomination.

I Play Rocky premieres on 12 September, one day and eight years later. THR's Scott Feinberg has already framed it in exactly those terms and describes the film as "high-testing," listing it in Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.

What has happened in between is not nothing. Farrelly's three films since Green Book all went straight to streaming: The Greatest Beer Run Ever (42%), Ricky Stanicky (45%) and Balls Up (23%), which went to number one on Prime Video in April anyway. I Play Rocky is his first wide theatrical release in eight years.

And the symmetry has a sting. THR's own 2015 poll of Academy members found that, given a second chance, they would take Best Picture off Rocky and give it to All the President's Men. Green Book's win is the modern equivalent of that argument. The director of the most re-litigated Best Picture of the 2010s is retracing his exact winning route with a film about the most re-litigated Best Picture of the 1970s.

The man who owns Rocky isn't in this one either

Irwin Winkler bought the rights before day one and still owns them. He produced all three Creed films. He is 95. Asked about I Play Rocky:

"No. I have nothing to do with it. I'm a character in the movie, but we all are because we're all public people. An actor plays me — but that's it."

He has seen it and likes it. He also said, of Stallone: "I don't think he gets anything for it, either. But I heard he really liked it, too." Winkler will be at the premiere.

So the producer who owns the picture is on the red carpet for the film about how he got it, and the writer who would not sell it says he was never asked and, per Winkler, is not being paid.

Cast, and what nobody knows

Ippolito as Stallone; Stephan James as Carl Weathers; Matt Dillon as Frank Stallone Sr.; AnnaSophia Robb as Sasha Czack; P.J. Byrne as Irwin Winkler; Toby Kebbell as Robert Chartoff; Jay Duplass as John G. Avildsen; Kiki Seto as Talia Shire; Robert Morgan as Burgess Meredith; Tracy Letts as a composite studio executive. Written by Peter Gamble — not by Farrelly, whatever some coverage says. Shot in New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles.

• The budget has never been reported.
• The wide date is now only "later in November."
• No reviews exist. The first land on 12 September.
• Whether Stallone has seen it rests on Winkler's hearsay.
• Whether he receives anything rests on Winkler's hedge.

One last thing worth noticing. In the same year he says he had zero to do with the film about the making of Rocky, Stallone wrote a new introduction for an official Rocky art book, sold a seven-figure memoir named for the Rocky steps, and gave a long, warm anniversary interview about it. The objection was never to the anniversary industry. It was to one specific room he was not in.