Sylvester Stallone Reveals the Plans For a ‘Creed’ Sequel

Creed has been something of a surprise success for Warner Bros. The rare film that is both audiences and critics love and makes money. And you know what that means: SEQUEL TIME!

Sylvester Stallone, who’s out promoting his own performance in the film, which has been nominated for a Golden Globe, told Variety that he’s spoken with director Ryan Coogler about the follow-up and they have two potential ideas. Peep this:

— “Ryan has some ideas of going forward and backward and actually seeing Rocky and Apollo together. Think of The Godfather 2. That’s what he was thinking of, which was kind of ambitious.” OR…

— “You’ll have him face a different opponent, which I would say is a more ferocious, big Russian. You can start to meld my experiences and then you start to bring different cultures into it. And you can see what’s happening with the Russians today in America. The complication will come with the girl’s ambition, because she’s not Adrian. She has places to go, things to see, the clock is running on her hearing.”

Huh. OK. To be completely fair, Coogler didn’t seem happy Stallone was talking about these ideas publicly (“Oh no!” he was quoted by Variety as saying when told Stallone spilled the beans), mostly because everything is still up in the air. Coogler recently signed a deal to direct Black Panther for Marvel and may not even direct a Creed sequel, something Stallone even admits.

Neither of those ideas seem particularly exciting — Idea Two doesn’t focus nearly enough of Adonis, the character we came to love in the first film, and Idea Two seems to basically be rehashing Rocky IV as some sort of revenge play for the younger Creed — but frankly no idea for a Creed sequel seems very exciting.

Creed was so surprising because the Rocky franchise drove itself into the ground with endless sequels. Creed brought something completely fresh and new to the Rocky films and to just fall down that same trap would be disappointing. But, considering how well the film did, and how we know Stallone has a hard time saying no to sequels, this could very well be happening in the near future.