Lookout - the Rocky spinoffs are coming ...

What do you do to keep the Rocky franchise alive when Rocky is too old to fight? Start the spinoffs coming ..

Creed -- about Apollo Creed's son - Sylvester Stallone reveals first official look at upcoming ‘Rocky’ spin-off, ‘Creed’

Drago - Everyone's favorite Russian boxer has to fight heavyweight champ Mason "The Line" Dixon
The next ‘Rocky’ spinoff could be based around ‘Rocky IV’s’ Ivan Drago

 

I'm eagerly awaiting "Raising Kane" on how Union Kane struggles to continue to fight after being order to lay down against Tommy Gunn.

 

When does the ghost of Pauly enter stage right?

 

That "Drago" movie sounds an awful lot like the plot of the modern-day classic Kickboxer 4.

If you're gonna rip something off, be sure to aim for the cream of the crop...

 

When they do the training montage, I hope they play this song:

 

Actually they could have cooked up a kinda interesting movie about Rocky's vanquished arch-nemeses in about 2000, while Stallone was taking a 15-year break from the character.

Clubber Lang would have followed George Foreman's career path and become a preacher then probably made a boxing comeback in the mid-90s.

Drago would have been disgraced in the USSR after the loss and probably defected just before or after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Off his steroids regimen Drago would have shrunk way down and bounced around through various burned-out celebrity roles.

 

That might have hit a little too close to home for Dolph Lundgren, don't you think?

 

"Creed" sounds like it could be good. It could also be horrible, but hey. Of the six movies, the fifth movie was the only one I didn't find at least entertaining. (And even that one is "so bad it's funny" in some parts.)

 

But which one would have had a popular consumer product - like a grill -bear his name?

 

I love 'Rocky.'
And 'Rocky 3' is so bad it's funny.

The rest of them have not been good.

 

Man, I still love 'Rocky 3,' and the first three made for a decent trilogy, albeit in descending order of quality.

The quality continued to slide in Rocky IV (although I still enjoy it) and took a steep drop in V (never have seen that all the way through).

I thought 'Rocky Balboa' was surprisingly very good.

 

I thought the Russian training sequences in IV were a pretty interesting way to switch up the formula. Rocky's "we can change" speech at the end was corny, but seemed prescient a few years later when the Iron Curtain really did fall.

V slid off the end of the earth. Dreck.

"Balboa" was a stunningly non-awful rebound. I had expected to click it off after a half-hour.