Rocky IV: 10 things you probably didn’t know about this classic movie | guioteca.com

In 1985, actor and director Sylvester Stallone released “Rocky IV”, the fourth part of the film franchise of boxer Rocky Balboa, which showed him planning to retire from boxing after regaining his world title against Clubber Lang in “Rocky III”. However, the appearance of Iván Drago, a young and brutal boxer almost two meters tall from the Soviet Union, who in an exhibition fight ended up killing Apollo Creed, Rocky’s first rival and friend, made him the strongest contender to dispute the title.

More than 35 years after the premiere of “Rocky IV”, here we tell you 10 curiosities that you surely did not know about this classic film:

1) More than 8 thousand actors auditioned to get the role of Russian boxer Iván Drago, but it would be the Swedish Dolph Lundgren who got the role. Curiously, at first Sylvester Stallone did not like the choice of the producers at all, as he considered that Lundgren was too handsome and perfect for the role. Sly, it seems, wanted instead “a monster, someone like a hairy beast.”

However, once he saw Lundgren dressed as a boxer, with his characteristic red shorts, he decided to cast the character as someone who represented the “man of the future”.

2) As the story goes, during the filming of the final fight of “Rocky IV”, Dolph Lundgren hit Sylvester Stallone in the chest so hard that his heart hit his sternum and began to swell, so that the actor He had to spend eight days under intensive care, because, if he had not been treated, he could have died.

“In the first round, where he knocked me down, that’s real. He pulverized me and I didn’t feel it at the time, but later that night my heart started to swell. I had hurt my cardio-perio sac, which is when the heart hits the chest, like in a car accident when the chest hits the steering wheel. My blood pressure went up to 260. The doctors thought I was going to be talking to angels”, detailed Sylvester Stallone himself.

3) The protagonist of “Rocky IV” would not be the only one who had to suffer the tremendous physical strength of Dolph Lundgren, who apparently took his role too seriously. At the time of filming the boxing match between Apollo Creed, played by Carl Weathers, and Iván Drago, when the Russian boxer beats the African-American boxer to death, Lundgren hit Weathers so hard that it almost caused a big fight between them.

Reportedly, Weathers was ready to walk off set and quit, but Stallone managed to talk him out of it and get him back on set, provided Lundgren agreed to lower the aggressiveness levels above the ring.

4) Although in the film the Soviet boxer Iván Drago appears as a rough and brutal guy, a mass of muscles whose only merit was to be something quite similar to a killing machine, in real life the actor Dolph Lundgren was not stupid at all . His IQ, in fact, is 160, a number well above average, and, as if this were not enough, he also graduated as a chemical engineer.

5) Although Dolph Lundgren is a very intelligent person, for the film he should not have memorized large scripts or extensive dialogues, since all of his character’s speech, throughout the entire film, was summed up in just 9 lines.

6) The robot that appears at the beginning of “Rocky IV”, in the mansion of the champion, serving beer to Paulie, Rocky’s brother-in-law, was designed to help Sylvester Stallone’s son, Seargeoh, who suffers from autism.

Robert Doornick, the founder of International Robotics, revealed that after appearing on a talk show about the use of robots in therapy with children with autism, he received a call from Sylvester Stallone, who requested a robot to see if it could help his son. child to communicate better. Stallone thus decided to include the robot in the script so that he could work with his son while filming.

7) The famous red shorts -the color of communism- worn by boxer Iván Drago were an essential part of the character, an icon in themselves, although in 1990 they were stolen from the house of actor Dolph Lundgren and were never seen again. know about them.

8) “Rocky IV” was the highest-grossing film in the Rocky film saga, grossing $300 million worldwide. Also, with its 94 minutes, it is the shortest film in the entire franchise, not to mention that it was also the first film in which the famous song “Gonna Fly Now”, composed by Bill Conti, does not sound.

In 2001 Sylvester Stallone attended the “Friday Night with Jonathan Ross” program, and there he was asked to give each Rocky movie a score from 1 to 10. And “Rocky IV” he gave a 7, 5.

9) The excellent box office results of “Rocky IV” led Sylvester Stallone to plan a sequel focused on the lives of Iván Drago and Rocky after their confrontation, although he later decided that it was best to continue with Balboa’s personal story.

10) The most important milestone in the plot of “Rocky IV” is, without a doubt, the death of Rocky Balboa’s former rival and later friend, boxer Apollo Creed, who dies after a fateful and brutal exhibition fight against Iván Drago in the U.S.

The death of Apollo Creed, by the way, generated a lot of sadness among the fans of the saga, and even more so in the way he died. Sylvester Stallone, in a documentary that was filmed on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the premiere of “Rocky IV”, acknowledged that this decision “was silly”, assuring that “I should never have killed him”.

In that sense, Sly pointed out that it was more effective, in narrative terms, that Apollo had suffered a serious injury, so that he had retired from professional boxing to assume the role of Mickey, that is, as the trainer of Rocky Balboa himself.