Sylvester Stallone shared that an extensive Rocky ice skating scene had to be scrapped during filming. He also revealed that he was pretty glad it ended up that way because what made it to the final cut was much better.
Ahead of the release date for 40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of a Classic, Stallone has been speaking a lot about the documentary and what it took to put the classic movie together.
Stallone even revealed that he had to steal some of Rocky’s moves from real boxers to sell the character to audiences. It worked well, taking the movie through box office success and straight to the Oscars.
But let’s get back to that infamous scene from Rocky that took place at the ice rink – and how much different it looked in the original script.
Rocky Balboa fights a figure skater?
For the documentary called 40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of a Classic, Sylvester Stallone serves as the narrator for a large part of it. That makes sense, as he was the man behind the film and the star of the movie.
During a segment of the doc, he talks about the iconic skating scene he filmed with co-star Talia Shire (Rocky’s wife, Adrian), revealing it would have looked a lot different if he’d had his way.
Stallone states that he had written the scene for 300 extras. He goes on to say that Adrian was supposed to be taken out on the ice by an ice skater, and he shows off to humiliate Rocky. That leads to Rocky getting into a “beef” with the skater.
As he tells the story, Stallone says that he showed up to filming and found out that all of the extras had to be cut. It forced him to work out a new scene – one in which it was just him and Shire carrying the film.
Stallone said, “I had to rewrite it with just the two of us on the ice, and since I can’t ice-skate Rocky runs alongside of her. She was not exactly Ice Capades either! It reflected that neither one of them was very graceful in life, but together they’re a perfect fit. It turned out to be 1,000 times better than if there had been a big crowd, so I got very lucky on that day.”
The rest is history
40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of a Classic release date
The documentary has a digital release date of June 9. It will present a behind-the-scenes look at what it took to get the classic boxing film to the big screen.