Fifty years after Sylvester Stallone first laced up Rocky Balboa's gloves, Anthony Ippolito is now playing Stallone himself in I Play Rocky, a film about the making of the original 1976 classic—one that took shape without the studio that owns the franchise.

Directed by Peter Farrelly, the movie traces Stallone's hardscrabble push to write Rocky and his refusal to let anyone else play the title role. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where it finished as first runner-up for the People's Choice Award, an audience-voted honor that has historically pointed to awards-season contenders.

The film is also the first from the Rocky universe to come together entirely under Amazon's ownership, giving Amazon MGM Studios a new way to introduce one of its marquee franchises to a fresh generation of viewers. According to screenwriter Peter Gamble, that prospective payoff is precisely why competing studios wanted no part of it.

How a $1 million underdog became a $1.9 billion franchise

Rocky opened in November 1976, earned 10 Academy Award nominations, and won three, including Best Picture, grossing about $117 million at the domestic box office. Alongside The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars, it is frequently credited with launching Hollywood's blockbuster era—the stretch of entertaining, grandiose, myth-affirming films that seeded billion-dollar franchises.

Five sequels followed between 1979 and 2006, then came the Creed spinoff trilogy, along with merchandise ranging from action figures to mobile games. For a movie made for roughly $1 million about a fighter going the distance, Rocky has remained culturally durable across generations: the nine films have grossed approximately $948 million domestically and $1.9 billion worldwide, according to The Numbers.

That library accounted for a meaningful share of what Amazon purchased when it agreed to pay $8.45 billion for MGM, home to both Rocky and James Bond. The deal closed in 2022, and MGM now operates inside Amazon MGM Studios. Its parent company has since climbed to No. 1 on the 2026 Fortune 500, ending Walmart's 13-year run atop the list.

The franchise has already delivered once for its new owner. Creed III opened to $58.7 million in March 2023, a mark that stood as Amazon's best opening since the MGM deal until Project Hail Mary surpassed it this year. But Creed III was already in production when the acquisition closed.

A spec script that still needed MGM

I Play Rocky, by contrast, was developed without the studio's involvement. Gamble wrote the screenplay on spec—meaning he wrote it independently, without a studio commission—and it landed on the Black List, an annual survey of Hollywood's most-liked unproduced screenplays, before reaching producers Christian Baha and Toby Emmerich and director Farrelly. In 2024, the team brought the project to the Marché du Film at Cannes—the annual marketplace held alongside the festival, where independent productions seek out financing and distribution partners—to court financiers, opting for the independent route over studio financing.

“Technically you can tell a story about Stallone because he's a public figure, and technically you can show scenes from the film as long as you comment on the scenes,” Gamble told Fortune. “So in theory, you don't need the rights to Rocky to make this movie, but just because something is technically true doesn't mean that it's the smartest thing to do.”

Dramatizing the making of Rocky might have qualified as fair use, but certain elements of the original's iconography—most notably Bill Conti's unmistakable theme, “Gonna Fly Now”—would have been difficult and costly to include without MGM's cooperation. Copyright law is not an exact science, and every reference to the 1976 film would have placed the production on a treacherous line.

Distribution presented the same obstacle: a movie about the origins of one studio's franchise was a tough sell to every other studio. “We tried to go to the different studios, but the studios had the problem of 'If we make this story, it's going to be advertising another studio's franchise,'” Gamble explained. “They were kind of like, 'We don't know if that's really the risk we want to take because a lot of the reward goes to someone else. This is really an Amazon MGM project.'”

Introducing Rocky to a new generation

Amazon MGM agreed to distribute the film in 2025, before cameras rolled, which cleared I Play Rocky to draw on the franchise. The finished film incorporates Conti's theme and recreates exact shots from the original.

If it succeeds, the film will deliver precisely what rival studios feared: a new generation of Rocky fans for Amazon. Nearly 20 years have passed since the last Rocky film, 2006's Rocky Balboa, and 11 since Creed reached theaters.

The early returns are encouraging. I Play Rocky opened on seven screens on Nov. 6 and grossed about $345,000—roughly $49,300 per screen—according to The Numbers>). It goes wide on Nov. 20, just as Rocky enters its sixth decade.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.