"All I wanna do is go the distance." – Rocky Balboa

Starring Sylvester Stallone

Rocky is a 1976 American sports drama film directed by John G. Avildsen, written by and starring Sylvester Stallone. It tells the rags to riches American Dream story of Rocky Balboa, an uneducated, kind-hearted working class Italian-American boxer, working as a debt collector for a loan shark in the slums of Philadelphia. Rocky, a small-time club fighter, gets a shot at the world heavyweight championship. The film also stars Talia Shire as Adrian, Burt Young as Adrian's brother Paulie, Burgess Meredith as Rocky's trainer Mickey Goldmill, and Carl Weathers as the reigning champion, Apollo Creed. The film, made on a budget of just over $1.1 million, was a sleeper hit; it earned $225 million in global box office receipts, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1976. The film was critically acclaimed and solidified Stallone's career as well as commenced his rise to prominence as a major movie star of that era. Among other accolades, it went on to receive ten Academy Award nominations, winning three, including Best Picture. In 2006, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". Rocky is considered to be one of the greatest sports films ever made and was ranked as the second-best in the genre, after Raging Bull, by the American Film Institute in 2008. The film has spawned eight sequels: Rocky II (1979), Rocky III (1982), Rocky IV (1985), Rocky V (1990), Rocky Balboa (2006), Creed (2015), Creed II (2018), and Creed III (2022). Stallone portrays Rocky in all eight films, wrote six, co-wrote two, and directed four of the six titular installments.