“He dared the critics to fight”: that’s why Sylvester Stallone was furious with the press after “Rocky”.

Sylvester Stallone chased the American dream for a long time until it finally became reality for him with the Oscar success ‘Rocky’. The boxer drama was supposed to make the Italian-American actor an overnight superstar. Today the film is one of the great milestones in pop culture and cinema history is indispensable without it. But even though ‘Rocky’ brought fame to Stallone, the years that followed were not exactly pleasant for him.

The problem was that “Rocky” had to create a huge expectation of what Sylvester Stallone would deliver after the raw character study. In the Netflix documentary ‘Sly’, released in 2023, the action hero explained: “Right after ‘Rocky,’ people turned me into something bigger than I could ever be.” And that’s right, because with “FIST – A man goes his way” and “Forecourt to Paradise” Stallone caused two huge flops after the milestone.

Sylvester Stallone challenged his critics

In fact, “FIST” and “Forecourt to Paradise” not only failed at the box office, but were largely neglected by the press at the time. This was especially painful for Stallone in the case of ‘Forecourt to Paradise’, because here he not only played the lead role, but also directed and wrote the screenplay. Stallone had also written the script for the film before ‘Rocky’ – and reacted furiously to all the criticism that came his way:

“He didn’t expect ‘FIST’ to do so poorly. And he didn’t expect that the critics who praised “Rocky” would have bad things to say about “The Courtyard to Paradise.” He didn’t handle it well. He showed up and challenged his critics to fight.”, explains the creator of “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood”. Quentin Tarantino in the Netflix documentary ‘Sly’.

You can probably understand to some extent why Sylvester Stallone reacted so angrily to the bad reviews, after all, he had been struggling to gain a foothold in the film industry for years. The failures with “FIST” and “Vorhof zum Paradies” were a bitter setback in continuing to prove themselves. But Stallone persevered, as he explains in the documentary: “I’ve learned that this will pass. You just have to stick to it. Don’t have anxiety attacks.” And as we know today, better and more successful times would come with “Rocky II”.