As promised earlier this year, Sylvester Stallone is pressing ahead with a new cut of Rocky IV – but he’s planning to cut the robot out of it.
2020 has been a year to forget for many reasons. There’s been precious little to celebrate, but if nothing else, Sylvester Stallone is set to salute the thirty-fifth anniversary of Rocky IV, his 1985 boxing classic. The director and star is recutting a director’s version of Rocky IV to mark the occasion.
As well as officially announcing the long-rumoured project on Instagram, Stallone also offered a few hints as to the shape the new cut might take.
According to Dark Horizons, Stallone has announced that the infamous robot scene will be cut from the film. Just in case it’s slipped your mind, the robot was a six-foot tall mechanical servant that Rocky, at the peak of his wealth and fame, gifted to his bother-in-law Paulie. The moment was emblematic of the Rocky series succumbing to the more outlandish excesses of the 1980s and marked something of a departure for the franchise from its roots as an Oscar-winning melodramatic feature.
For the following film, Rocky V, the movies would begin the process of leaning back into their grungier, stripped-back origins, leaving the robot scene as something of an outlier in that regard. Stallone himself said “the robot is going to the junkyard forever, no more robot… I don’t like the robot anymore.”
Although fans of the series may miss the robot, Stallone is clearly going in a different direction with his director’s cut, perhaps aiming to bring the film more tonally in line with the other instalments. Or maybe it’s just because it’s 2020 , rogue A.I. is a real thing and Stallone has developed a fear of robots, who knows? What we are certain of is that the Rocky IV director’s cut will be something to behold. But the reinstate the robot campaign is already well underway…
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