Every “Rocky” movie ranked, from Sylvester Stallone’s iconic classic to “I Play Rocky”
Every “Rocky” movie ranked, from Sylvester Stallone’s iconic classic to “I Play Rocky”
Jesse HassengerSat, November 7, 2026 at 11:30 AM UTC
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The ‘Rocky’ franchise, from the 1976 original to ‘Creed’ to ‘I Play Rocky’ bringing it full circleCredit: United Artists/Courtesy Everett; Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros.; Claire Folger
At the end of I Play Rocky, a movie about the unlikely making of the 1976 classic, Rocky Balboa and his creator Sylvester Stallone have it made. They’ve triumphed against long odds, with Stallone having bet big on himself — and won.
The movie features the obligatory pre-credits info drop explaining the full extent of Rocky’s success. What it doesn’t get into is that it spawned a decades-spanning franchise that Stallone would return to again and again. Maybe the filmmakers wanted to keep the focus on the artistic value, the purity, of that first film; maybe, on the other hand, bragging about the further success of Rocky in later iterations would have felt like bragging (and less becoming of the awards I Play Rocky itself hopes to win). Either way, the movie makes it feel like Rocky the movie and Rocky the franchise are two different entities.
And in a way, they are. Yet while some subsequent Rocky entries are picture-perfect examples of how to commodify and/or exhaust a franchise, there’s also a better-than-average hit rate, especially once Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan revived the series from the side with Creed in 2015.
I Play Rocky feels like it counts as part of the franchise family, too, even though Stallone had nothing to do with it. The movie functions in many ways as a meta remake of the first film, with Stallone rather than Balboa as the underdog.
Of course, the original Rocky sextet feels like a multi-volume autobiography of ol’ Sly Stallone, for better or worse. They’ve got spectacular highs, embarrassing lows, and plenty of stubborn repetition. With I Play Rocky unofficially rounding out the series at 10 and Stallone looking back on his life with a memoir, now’s a good time to sort through the movies and rank them from worst to best.
It may rankle fans of certain sequels, but hey, how can Rocky Balboa remain an underdog without someone punching at him from somewhere?
01 of 10
Rocky IV (1985)
Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren settling the Cold War once and for allCredit: MGM/Courtesy Everett
Let’s start with a little controversy. Rocky IV became the series’ biggest grosser in 1985, a banner year for Stallone that also saw Rambo: First Blood Part II make a heap of money.
It’s possible, then, to blame the success of these terrible sequels for the ego and hubris that followed. Even ignoring the greater ramifications, Rocky IV is a borderline insulting affair chintzed up as a victory-lap crowd-pleaser. Yes, fans seem to love it because of its macho late-Cold War camp, with Rocky seeking revenge for the death of Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) by fighting the Russian monster Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren).
But this is the backbone of a skeletal movie that resorts to multiple montages, including one featuring footage from earlier in the movie, just to pad itself past the 90-minute mark. Rocky himself loses most of his aw-shucks charm (he’s barely recognizable as the guy from the first movie). While Drago is a memorable villain, this fourquel is too bogged down with cutesy tedium (Paulie’s robot?!) to actually work.
Plenty will protest, but frankly, if this movie were half as good as its following insists, would Stallone have seen fit to release the darker-hued director’s cut 36 years later?
02 of 10
I Play Rocky (2026)
Anthony Ippolito playing Sylvester Stallone playing Rocky BalboaCredit: Claire Folger
Redoing Rocky as a movie about the making of Rocky seems like an inspired idea — until the realization hits that while the Rocky movies are fiction, they’re certainly autobiographical enough to make a “true” version mostly redundant.
Director Peter Farrelly knows his way around scrappy, unpretentious entertainment, but there simply isn’t all that much dramatic juice in watching Stallone (Anthony Ippolito) reinterpreted as a middling Balboa imitation, refusing to sell his screenplay unless he gets to star, too.
The movie is most fun when it focuses on its most irascible characters: director John G. Avildsen (Jay Duplass) and the fictional Sandy Maddox (Tracy Letts), a composite of various studio execs. Maybe Farrelly should have hewed closer to his comic roots, rather than trying to make something inspirational. Plenty of its grace notes feel Hollywood-level phony, and the triumphant stuff feels like stolen valor.
03 of 10
Rocky II (1979)
Sylvester Stallone pumps himself up in ‘Rocky II’Credit: United Artists/Courtesy Everett
Though it was considered pretty respectable in its day, years later Rocky II has a neither-fish-nor-fowl quality. It’s far more grounded than the next couple of sequels, simply following Rocky and Apollo in the aftermath of the climactic fight from the first movie. Apollo wants a rematch to prove Rocky’s surprise split-decision resilience was a fluke; Rocky wants to retire for his health, but finds he can’t make much money off his newfound celebrity.
Eventually, the men get back in the ring. The scenes in which Rocky notably does not find fame and fortune after a single underdog moral victory certainly ring true, and it’s nice to see some follow-up to his romance with Adrian (Talia Shire). But ultimately this direct sequel is an odd cross between a coda and a pasted-on happy ending.
04 of 10
Rocky V (1990)
Rocky Balboa is in Tommy Morrison’s corner in ‘Rocky V’Credit: United Artists/Courtesy Everett
And now for the franchise’s most reviled and, as such, most underrated entry. Stallone wanted to end the series and return it to a more grounded level, hence the return of original director John G. Avildsen and Rocky going back to his working-class roots after an injury forces a retirement from boxing (and money mismanagement forces him out of his mansion).
The movie doesn’t even climax with a boxing match, which surely disappointed and confused fans at the time. While Stallone and Avildsen don’t exactly recapture the original’s magic, they at least do a credible job of continuing Rocky’s story; it’s like a more downbeat version of Rocky II. Clearly they were on to something — elements of Rocky V would be revived (to better effect) in Rocky Balboa and the Creed movies.
This is an inessential sequel, but it’s more compelling than Rocky II and less embarrassing than Rocky IV.
05 of 10
Creed II (2018)
Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) and his team in ‘Creed II’Credit: Barry Wetcher/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures
Ryan Coogler’s Creed does a remarkable job incorporating one of the series’ cheesiest moves — Apollo Creed’s in-ring death at the hands of Ivan Drago — into a grounded, emotional story for Creed’s secret son Adonis.
So when Drago and his son are revisited more directly in Steven Caple Jr.’s Creed II, it’s both well done and a little played out; the first movie already addressed themes about the sins of the father and the acceptance of legacy without doing a formal son-versus-son matchup.
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Similarly, the material with Rocky and his semi-estranged son feels rehashed from later-period sequels. That’s the peril of following up the rare near-perfect legacy sequel. But Creed II is still solid stuff for anyone who fell in love with these characters in the previous film.
06 of 10
Rocky Balboa (2006)
An older Rocky runs back up those steps (alongside his dog) in ‘Rocky Balboa’Credit: John Bramley/MGM
Stallone returned to directing for the first time since Rocky IV in a decades-later attempt to atone for Rocky V. (He also managed to revisit Rocky before Hollywood went completely legacy-sequel crazy in the latter half of the 2010s.)
To some extent, Creed has overshadowed this Rocky-at-60 comeback story — which, again, also hits some Rocky V beats, only much smoother. Halfway between Rocky V and Creed isn’t a bad place to land. There’s plenty of emotion to be wrung just from seeing Rocky go about his life as a restaurateur without Adrian, who succumbed to cancer a few years before the movie begins.
It’s hard to underestimate what a major comeback this was for Sly, who hadn’t done a movie since Spy Kids 3, nor a major theatrical release for grown-ups since the 2001 flop Driven. As such, it was especially satisfying for audiences to see him get scrappy and humanistic again, once more proving that the meta-narrative to the Rocky sequels can be as compelling as their actual stories.
07 of 10
Rocky III (1982)
Sylvester Stallone in ‘Rocky III’Credit: MGM/Courtesy Everett
If low esteem for Rocky IV made it seem like we can’t go with a sillier Rocky movie, rest assured there’s just a higher standard to adhere to: the one set by Rocky III, where the Italian Stallion fights Mr. T.
The future A-Team star was a major discovery as James “Clubber” Lang, who emerges on the scene insisting that Rocky defended his heavyweight title with a bunch of pushovers. He’s here to correct that — and he does, knocking our hero out in the second round to claim the belt.
Rocky eventually enlists former rival Apollo Creed to train him for a rematch with Lang. One of the major pleasures of this film is watching the two characters switch from rivals to buddies, fully capitalizing on Weathers’ charisma. It’s certainly a cartoonier and more melodramatic take on the Rocky material, but Weathers in particular makes it go down as delightful (if lightweight) entertainment.
08 of 10
Creed III (2023)
Michael B. Jordan and Jonathan Majors in ‘Creed III’Credit: Eli Ade/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc.
Michael B. Jordan pulls a Stallone by stepping into the director’s chair for the third Creed installment — the first Rocky-world entry not to involve Balboa directly. (Stallone, always reluctant to let go of his characters, seemed annoyed by this, but truly, Rocky’s story felt complete by the end of the first Creed.)
The movie has a blemish of sorts, in the form of a dynamic bad-guy performance from Jonathan Majors as a figure from Creed’s past; in light of the actor’s subsequent assault conviction, there’s less fun in seeing him as a figure of menace. At the time, though, it was an electrifying turn.
Moreover, Jordan proves himself a more promising director than Stallone (sorry, Sly!), adding some anime touches to his fight scenes without neglecting the franchise’s more human side, embodied by Donnie’s wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and their daughter Amara.
09 of 10
Creed (2015)
Rocky Balboa (Stallone) trains Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) in the franchise-revitalizing ‘Creed’Credit: Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros.
Is this the best mainstream dude weepie of the 21st century? Ryan Coogler revitalizes the RCU (Rocky Cinematic Universe) more or less from the first frame, immersing the audience in the life of Adonis Creed with long takes emphasizing emotional immediacy.
Without simply copy-pasting Rocky’s background on to a new, younger contender (or even doing much convenient retconning), Coogler revives the scrappy Philadelphia spirit of the first film, introducing Donnie as the product of Apollo’s heretofore unseen extramarital affair, who becomes desperate to prove his own worth as a fighter.
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He turns to a reluctant Rocky Balboa, and Stallone delivers some of the best, most heartbreaking work of his career — and deservedly Oscar-nominated. His sometimes-underrated acting matched with someone else’s writing and directing is a combination we should have had more often in his career, and Jordan is no slouch either in his star-making turn.
By the time the movie essentially runs back the climax of the first film, it hardly matters: A few bars of Bill Conti’s theme music are all this terrific movie needs to bring the house down.
10 of 10
Rocky (1976)
Sylvester Stallone in his career-defining role in ‘Rocky’Credit: United Artists/Courtesy Everett
As many have noted, Rocky is — especially compared to the sequels and subsequent Stallone vehicles — much more of a ’70s-style character drama than a traditional sports movie. That’s absolutely true — yet that also makes it an unlikely (and, in retrospect, satisfying) Best Picture winner twice over.
Its charming underdog story doesn’t feel in step with many of the Oscar winners it followed (The French Connection, the Godfather movies, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and its modest, almost Marty-like qualities aren’t compatible with many big awards players of the next decade-plus. When Rocky says “He talkin’ to me?” at one point, Stallone accidentally evokes the same year’s Taxi Driver. In many ways, Rocky now feels like the gentler, less chilling flipside to Scorsese’s masterpiece about a lonely guy prowling the city streets.
Superbly acted and written by Stallone and sensitively directed by Avildsen, the movie couldn’t help but spawn sequels simply by virtue of its many memorable characters, not just Rocky and Apollo Creed, but shy neighborhood girl Adrian, grizzled trainer Mickey (Burgess Meredith), and semi-detestable Paulie (Burt Young).
All of them feel alive, especially before some of them are broadened or demoted in later installments. That those movies exist serves as a testament to this original classic’s enduring power.
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
