Denim Nastee

Sylvester Stallone doesn't own Rocky. He has to ask a 95-year-old man for permission to play a character he invented, and that's who he means by "the other fellow." The guy's name is Irwin Winkler, and the story of how he ended up owning Rocky instead of Stallone is wild. Back in 1975, Stallone was a broke actor with $106 in his bank account. He wrote Rocky in three and a half days. Studios loved it and offered him up to $360,000 for the script, but they wanted Burt Reynolds or Ryan O'Neal in the lead. Stallone turned all of it down and took about $75,000 plus points so he could play Rocky himself. Great call for his career. Terrible call for ownership, because the rights went to the producers, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff. When Rocky won Best Picture in 1977, Stallone sat in the audience and watched the two producers walk onstage to collect the Oscar for the movie he wrote. Fifty years later the franchise is at nearly $1.8 billion across nine films, and Stallone's cut is an acting paycheck. Winkler still controls the character. It boiled over in 2022 when a Drago spinoff got announced and nobody even told Stallone. He went off publicly, called Winkler a "parasite" picking clean the bones of characters he created, and admitted the thing that actually stings. All he ever wanted was a piece of Rocky to leave his kids, and he never got it. So yeah, he'll do Creed 4 with Michael B. Jordan. He just refuses to work with the man who bought his life's work off him for $75,000 when he was desperate, and honestly, who would.