The first draft of Sylvester Stallone's Rocky script saw Balboa throw the fight to Apollo Creed. While the Rocky franchise lives on today with Michael B. Jordan’s Creed movies, the third of which is due next November, it all started with the original Rocky film from 1976. Directed by John G. Avildsen, the film follows Stallone as its titular small-time boxer who gets a shot at the world heavyweight championship. Rocky also stars Burgess Meredith as his trainer, Mickey Goldmill, and Carl Weathers as the reigning champion, Apollo Creed.
With a modest budget of just under one million dollars (or about $4.5 million today), Rocky went onto become one of the biggest sleeper hits of all time, grossing $225 million at the box office, which is the equivalent of a billion-dollar blockbuster today. It's a real-life rags to riches story that rivaled the film’s narrative. Lately, Stallone has been talking about his director's cut of Rocky IV releasing this November, but in a previous interview, he opened up about the film that started it all, revealing a surprising fact about its original script.
In the interview, Stallone said the first draft of his screenplay for Rocky saw his titular character throw the final bout to Creed. Taking inspiration from the Muhammad Ali-Chuck Wepner fight from 1975, Stallone said he went on a “writing frenzy,” finishing a 90-page screenplay in just three days, only about 10 percent of which made it into the final product. Balboa explained the original script's ending, per THR, below:
The character was very dark. As a matter of fact, he throws the fight at the very end. And Mickey [Burgess Meredith] himself turns out to be this very angry, racist man. And the reason Rocky throws the fight is because he doesn’t want to be involved in this kind of world. He says, “I would just rather be who I was and just have all this hatred around me and so on.”
However, the first person Stallone showed this script to was his wife at the time, Sasha Czack. She hated the character of Rocky because he was “nasty” and “unrepentant.” Therefore, Stallone went back and re-wrote the script numerous times before settling on the relentlessly driven fighter that fans know and love today.
Rocky ends with Balboa losing to Creed, but the judges' decision is practically an afterthought as Rocky, an enormous underdog, accomplished his goal of going the full fifteen rounds with the heavyweight champion which no previous challenger had done. The ending was also modified to revolve around Rocky’s love interest, Adrian (Talia Shire), as the two embrace during the film’s final moments. It’s hard to imagine if Stallone had gone with the original script, as Rocky went on to win Best Picture and launched the actor into icon status.
Source: THR