Sylvester Stallone puts the final touches on his director’s cut of Rocky IV in a new video. Released in 1985, the fourth film in the series plunged Rocky Balboa (Stallone) headlong into the Cold War as the eternal underdog headed to the Soviet Union for a showdown against invincible Russian boxing machine Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren).
Of course Rocky’s motivations for fighting the imposing Drago in Rocky IV went far beyond politics, as he also looked for personal revenge against the man who killed his friend Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in the ring. With a box office take of $127 million, Rocky IV went on to be one of the most profitable movies in the entire series, but history also remembers it as arguably the cheesiest of all the Rocky films. The character of Drago would of course figure in the future of the Rocky franchise, as he returned alongside his son Viktor (Florian Munteanu) for Creed 2, which saw Apollo Creed’s son Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) seeking his own measure of revenge years after the death of his father.
With his own future in the Rocky-extending Creed series very much up in the air, Stallone recently has been revisiting Rocky’s past by putting together a director’s cut of Rocky IV. In a new posting on Instagram, Stallone gives fans a glimpse of the on-going work on that director’s cut, including a bit of footage from the iconic fight between Apollo Creed and Ivan Drago. See the clip in the space below:
In the clip Stallone is seen sitting at a mixing board which he compares to the controls of a starship, appropriately masked up. He then explains that his crew is in the final stages of mixing the new cut, using modern technology to enhance the sound from the 35-year-old movie. It’s indeed appropriate that in the clip Stallone and his crew are working on the epic Rocky IV fight between Apollo Creed and Drago, as the director’s cut will reportedly feature previously unseen footage from that particular pivotal scene, which of course ends in tragic fashion with Rocky hesitating to throw in the towel as Drago pummels his friend literally to death.
While the new cut of Rocky IV will include more of Apollo vs. Drago, it will include less of one of the movie’s more cheesy elements, Sico the Robot. Indeed Stallone himself revealed that the robot, which in the movie is given as a gift to a lonely Paulie (Burt Young), is “going to the junkyard forever,” a move that upset the robot’s creator Robert Doornick, who went on to accuse Stallone of excising Sico from the director’s cut to avoid paying royalties.
In the above clip Stallone assures fans that his new cut of Rocky IV will be sensational, but it remains to be seen if adding more boxing while removing Sico the Robot will ultimately result in a better version of the movie. What is certain is that Rocky IV remains one of the most popular of the original Rocky films, in spite of its very ‘80s politics and other glaringly over-the-top elements.
