‘I Play Rocky’ Premieres at TIFF: A Movie About a Best Picture Winner That Might Become One

The crowd at the Princess of Wales Theatre erupted repeatedly during Peter Farrelly’s Sylvester Stallone origin story.

There is a certain symmetry in a film about an unknown who bet everything on himself premiering at the festival that has a habit of turning modest crowd-pleasers into Best Picture winners. I Play Rocky held its world premiere Saturday night at the Princess of Wales Theatre as part of TIFF’s Special Presentations program, and the reaction suggested Peter Farrelly may have found his way back to that exact lane.

Applause reportedly broke out multiple times during the screening, particularly as the film recreates key moments from the 1976 original, which became the highest-grossing film of its year before collecting 10 Oscar nominations and three wins, including Best Picture. A post-screening Q&A followed with Farrelly, star Anthony Ippolito, Stephan James, Jay Duplass and screenwriter Peter Gamble.

The Story Behind the Story

I Play Rocky chronicles one of Hollywood’s most improbable success stories: a broke, largely unknown actor with a screenplay nobody wanted and one nonnegotiable condition attached to it. Stallone would sell Rocky only if he played Rocky. Studios offered money on the condition that an established star throw the punches. He refused, and the standoff that followed became its own kind of prizefight.

Amazon MGM’s synopsis frames it plainly: the film tells “the true story of Sylvester Stallone and his unshakable belief that he wasn’t just meant to write Rocky, he was meant to be Rocky Balboa.” Notably, Stallone himself is not involved in the production.

A Casting Story That Sounds Made Up

Farrelly told the Princess of Wales crowd the whole thing came down to a screenplay and a self-tape. “I read this script and I thought it was the greatest script I’d ever read,” he said of Gamble’s screenplay. The search for his Stallone then ended almost before it started. His casting agent called claiming to have found the lead: a then-unknown Anthony Ippolito, who had gotten hold of the script and shot three scenes himself in his grandmother’s basement. “I looked at it and the search was over,” Farrelly said. “That’s the guy. We didn’t have to go any further.”

Ippolito, a 27-year-old Long Island native who has been working since childhood, broke out as George Wright in Netflix’s Grand Army in 2020. He followed it playing a young Al Pacino in Paramount+’s The Offer, about the making of The Godfather. That makes I Play Rocky his second time portraying a young Italian American actor on the verge of a Best Picture winner, which is either a remarkable coincidence or the most specific typecasting in the business.

The preparation was not brief. “It took a lot of effort, upwards of a year and a half to two years,” Ippolito told the crowd, thanking Farrelly and the team for taking the chance on him. “This is absolutely surreal.”

A Deep Bench

The supporting cast is unusually stacked for a film of this size. AnnaSophia Robb plays Sasha Czack, Stallone’s first wife and earliest believer. Matt Dillon plays Frank Stallone Sr. Stephan James steps into the trunks as Carl Weathers, the actor who would become Apollo Creed. Kiki Seto plays Talia Shire, Robert Morgan plays Burgess Meredith, and Scot Teller plays Burt Young.

Jay Duplass plays Rocky director John G. Avildsen, with P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell as producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff. Tracy Letts also appears. Farrelly produces alongside Christian Baha, Toby Emmerich, Paul Currie and Michele Weiss.

The Farrelly Question

The awards math here is impossible to ignore. Eight years ago, Green Book won TIFF’s People’s Choice Award and rode that momentum to Best Picture, winning Farrelly two Oscars in the process. The People’s Choice Award remains one of the most reliable Best Picture predictors on the circuit, and I Play Rocky is exactly the kind of crowd-pleasing underdog story that tends to win it.

The stretch since Green Book has been considerably rockier. The Greatest Beer Run Ever drew mixed reviews, and his two subsequent Prime Video comedies, Ricky Stanicky and this year’s Balls Up, landed softly. Before his solo career, he co-directed Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary and Kingpin with his brother Bobby.

There’s also the matter of the reception this film has already received. When the trailer dropped in July, a meaningful chunk of the online response was mockery, with much of it directed at Ippolito’s Stallone voice and the inherent strangeness of making a Rocky-shaped movie about the making of Rocky. Some commenters read the whole thing as unintentional parody.

Which makes Saturday’s reaction more interesting, not less. A film that arrived with the internet’s knives already out drew sustained applause from a packed festival audience, and the early trade response out of the premiere has been strong. Farrelly has been in this exact position before, with critics skeptical and audiences responding, and it worked out reasonably well for him last time.

I Play Rocky premiered September 12 at the Toronto International Film Festival. Amazon MGM Studios opens the film in limited release November 6, expanding nationwide November 20.

Joanthan P. Moustakas

Jonathan P. Moustakas founded The Cinema Group in 2020 during the challenges of the pandemic, after losing the vital ability to find community in theaters and escape through the captivating magic of cinema. Feeling profoundly cut off from the vibrant film community he cherished, he sought to create a welcoming home for dedicated cinema fans while providing engaging, daily curated content that resonates with their passions. Years later, The Cinema Group has blossomed from a small collective of loyal fans into a thriving brand that reaches millions of audiences every month across a diverse array of platforms and mediums.

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