A third instalment in the Creed franchise hasn’t been officially announced yet, but if the movie goes ahead, producers already have their first choice of director lined up: Michael B. Jordan, who starred in the first two films as Adonis Creed. Irwin Winkler, the producer of the Creed movies as well as the original Rocky series of which they are a spinoff, revealed in his book, published this year, that he has assured Jordan he will have a shot at the director’s chair.
“I promised Michael B. Jordan that he’d get his chance to direct Creed III,” Winkler wrote in A Life in Movies: Stories From 50 Years in Hollywood, adding: “Last year in a conversation with our Creed star Michael B. Jordan, I offered him the opportunity to not only star in, but also to direct Creed III.”
Winkler made a similar offer to Sylvester Stallone, who created the character of Rocky Balboa, following the success of 1976’s Rocky, and Stallone stepped behind the camera to direct Rocky II in 1979. However, despite having leveraged that role into a wildly successful career, Stallone has since expressed his frustration with how he was never given annuity in the franchise. “I have zero ownership of Rocky,” he said earlier this year. “Every word, every syllable, every grammatical error was all my fault. It was shocking that it never came to be, but I was told, ‘Hey, you got paid, so what are you complaining about?’ I was furious.”
That said, Stallone returned to the world he created with the Creed movies, playing an older mentor figure to Jordan’s Adonis, son of his old friend Apollo Creed. Creed II expanded on that mythology by bringing in Florian Munteaunu as Viktor Drago, son of villain Ivan Drago. And should Creed III get made, Stallone is keen to introduce more members of the next generation: he and Jordan have said that real-life heavyweight boxer Deontay Wilder would be perfect to cast as the son of Rocky III character Clubber Lang.
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