Stallone Takes on Hollywood in the First I Play Rocky Trailer

Anthony Ippolito plays a young Sylvester Stallone, still unknown and stubborn enough to reject the most reasonable offer Hollywood could make him: sell the screenplay and let a famous actor take the lead. Instead, he insisted on being Rocky Balboa. Fifty years later, Hollywood has found the perfect way to produce another Rocky without having to call it Rocky IX.

Directed by Peter Farrelly and written by Peter Gamble, the film will open in select US theaters on November 6, 2026, before expanding later that month to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the original film, which was released in the United States on November 21, 1976.

Anthony Ippolito Steps into the Ring as Sylvester Stallone

The trailer for I Play Rocky shows Stallone trying to convince producers and financiers that he should be the star of his own screenplay. Not a celebrity, not a reassuring actor, not someone capable of pronouncing every consonant with perfect clarity. Him. The problem is that Stallone has no bargaining power yet.

All he has is a story, an unshakable belief and the face of a man who looks as though he has just been woken up in the middle of a boxing match. The trailer also acknowledges the more comical side of his persistence: Stallone hoists an enormous fish onto his shoulders, downs raw eggs and tackles training sessions with a level of coordination that is still very much a work in progress.

Ippolito is already familiar with the dangerous territory of portraying famous figures. In The Offer, he played a young Al Pacino during the making of The Godfather. Now he takes on Stallone, searching for something beyond the jawline, the posture and a way of speaking recognizable within three syllables. His audition method for I Play Rocky was perfectly in character: as soon as he heard about the project, he submitted a self-tape on his own initiative. The most direct possible way of saying: “I play Rocky.”

Alongside him, AnnaSophia Robb plays Sasha Czack, Stephan James portrays Carl Weathers, and Matt Dillon takes on the role of Frank Stallone Sr. The cast also includes P.J. Byrne as Irwin Winkler, Toby Kebbell as Robert Chartoff, Jay Duplass as director John G. Avildsen, Kiki Seto as Talia Shire, and Robert Morgan as Burgess Meredith.

When Stubbornness Becomes a Hollywood Legend

After Green Book, Peter Farrelly knows his way around films designed to make a complicated story easier to digest without leaving too many splinters on the carpet. This story contains all the elements the industry loves to celebrate after first trying to prevent them: an outsider, countless rejections, a financial risk, an unlikely victory and the chance to sell the whole thing fifty years later as motivational content.

The original Rocky cost around one million dollars and grossed $225 million worldwide. It won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for John G. Avildsen. Stallone also became only the third person in Academy Awards history to receive nominations for both acting and screenwriting in the same year.

Those numbers transformed a decision once regarded as irrational into one of the most frequently retold demonstrations of perseverance in American cinema. Because in the cultural industry, the line between genius and irresponsibility is often drawn by box-office results: before the money comes in, you are a problem; afterwards, you are a legend.

And so the trailer takes us back to the top of the Philadelphia steps: even nostalgia needs its morning workout before stepping back into the ring.