Sylvester Stallone explained during the Sunday night edition of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” how he changed the original ending of “Rocky,” admitting that he “begged” the film’s producers for another shot at it.
“It’s really interesting because, at the very end, Rocky walks out and he’s with Adrian. There’s trash everywhere, people have seen the fight and have gone home and they’re basically forgotten, like ten minutes later. Their moment passed,” Stallone recalled, telling “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon that he found the film’s original conclusion “kind of depressing.”
One of cinema’s most iconic finales, 1976’s “Rocky” famously ends with Stallone’s Rocky Balboa losing his life-changing fight against Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) but proving himself to be a worthy fighter. The movie subsequently concludes on a tight, freeze-frame close-up of Rocky’s face as he embraces Adrian (Talia Shire) in the aftermath of his bout with Apollo. According to Stallone, the film originally lacked that heartwarming final beat.
“I begged the producer. I said, ‘We got to end on a high note.’ He said, ‘We have no money.’ I said. ‘Well, we’ll figure it out,’” Stallone recalled. “We went around, asked a few friends. We got about 12 people and we couldn’t rebuild the ring. [So] we built maybe ten feet [of one].”
“It’s plywood and the ropes are saggy. We’re, like, holding the ropes up, and then we just said, ‘Keep walking in a circle,’” Stallone continued. “[Adrian] comes in the ring and [Rocky] goes, ‘Where’s your hat?’ And I went, ‘There it is.’ He doesn’t care about the fight. He just cares about falling in love and the music swells and they kiss and I go, ‘That was the peak of their life.’ So I wanted to freeze on that.”
Despite playing one of cinema’s most iconic fictional athletes, Stallone confessed Sunday night that he was not much of a football player during the brief time he played the sport in high school.
“I was terrible,” Stallone said. “They used to call me ‘wood hands’ because I never played sports as a young guy, and I go to school, I want to play football.” Apparently, Stallone was so embarrassed by his first-year athletic performance that he went to drastic lengths to try to get better.
“After the season was over, the entire summer I literally walked around with a football. I slept with a football, ate with a football. ‘How you doing football?’ Conversed with it, until finally the next year, I was ready to play,” he revealed, adding, “We didn’t win one game. Zero. That’s almost impossible.”
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