Creed knocks out new audiences with Rocky's old gloves

March 28, 1977. Oscars ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion.

a small production with a budget of barely a million dollars, has just won the award for best picture against four formidable opponents:

and

On stage, its two producers, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, in black suits, bow ties, occupy both sides of the lectern and microphones, and thank the award.

In the center, silent, wearing an open white shirt with long peaks, his chest exposed and disheveled, is the ideologue of all this: Sylvester Stallone, screenwriter, protagonist and promoter of a work on courage that, although he doesn't know it yet, will come to pass. history as the paradigm of the best popular cinema.

It is not for the actor to be there, since only the producers go out to collect the main Oscar, but Winkler has grabbed him by the waist in the corridor of the stalls and has forced him to accompany them.

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Sylvester Stallone: ​​“Failures make you smarter.

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What none of them imagines is that 46 years after that triumphant night, the film, turned into a franchise of nine titles, with deaths, resurrections and drifts, would be more alive than ever.

Still less, that Winkler and Stallone would go into a fight over the legacy of what such a work meant and continues to mean, both financially and sentimentally.

And even less, that the essentiality of the main character and the environments in which he develops veered from the prototype of the working-class white man, symbol of the resentment of the working class in the 1970s after the Vietnam War, to the culture Afro-American of the 21st century in all its extension: social, political, economic, cultural, sports and musical.

Michael B. Jordan, protagonist and director of 'Creed III'.

Creed III,

the third installment of the

dedicated to the son of Rocky's most famous rival, Apollo Creed, composed after five installments starring, guided and, in some cases, even directed by Stallone, and a praiseworthy revival, Rocky Balboa, 16

old after

it established the box office record for the saga the weekend of its opening in the US, obtaining 58 million dollars.

had grossed $29.6 million in 2016, and

35.5, in 2018. In Spain, exactly the same: just over half a million viewers with the first;

almost 800,000 with the second, while the third, number one in revenue in the first week of its premiere, has, after three weekends, 4.2 million euros and more than 600,000 tickets sold.

It will advance the precedents.

These are growing, and unusual, figures that speak of the popular health of a series that, for the moment, does not seem to have an end despite the brawls between Stallone and Winkler, 93, outside the ring: on social networks and in the media. media, although not in law firms because the actor can do little there.

he was never financially in control of the character;

He was increasingly paid for each of his works, whether they were acting, writing or directing, as a lead or supporting role.

But the truth is that, due to these disagreements,

is the first title in which he does not appear, although he reverently quotes his character in a couple of dialogues.

Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan, in 'Creed II'.MGM & Warner Bros. Entertainment

After the very worthy revitalization of the saga that was the nostalgic punch of

saga

has the value of having reached other cultures, races, generations and social spheres, maintaining the discourse of nobility, dreams, redemption , the dignity and courage of its maker.

Respect is perhaps the word that is repeated the most in the series: respect for oneself and for what has been achieved in life;

and respect for what others bequeathed to us.

And in this sense, the purely fictional, the stories and their characters, and the extra-cinematographic merge: what was achieved by Stallone, mainly, and also by Winkler, despite their disputes.

The inspiring tale of the little man rising to glory continues to swarm around

in a plot punctuated by the protagonist's dark past, who returns to settle accounts with the already retired successful millionaire that he is today.

And also, linking some subtexts and part of its conflicts with those of the original 1976 film, that of the boxer in the mud of life who has a unique and surely impossible chance to be the champion, in sport and in existence, and adding to it a simple but estimable classic touch with nuances of the fable of

and the interchanged lives of the characters of Michael B. Jordan, absolute protagonist, and Jonathan Majors, the childhood friend and true aspirant to triumph who ended up in jail for 18 years.

Black culture and community

Directed by its charismatic actor in a pulse-pounding behind-the-camera debut,

is, like its two predecessors, pure black culture and community.

And that twist, keeping the essences, from the neighborhood Italian colt, so close in some aspects to

and the later

from his brushes with the mafia, even the African-American myth of sports, married to a black music star, is fascinating.

With the character played by Tessa Thompson, that of the wife, the series has managed to become transmedia, by adding soundtracks integrated into the stories and full of big names in rap and the sounds most associated with black music, such as Childish. Gambino (Donald Glover), Meek Mill, Jhené Aiko and the producer and singer Mike Mill Made It. A transmedia narrative that has also arrived through the style of filming the combats of the three films, so similar to the television broadcasts of the HBO Sports chains and, in this latest installment, those of Dazn, with an explicit graphic presence of both platforms in the series.

Add influences and stamps of impact to incorporate new audiences.

And that, in this way, successive generations gather around the myth of Rocky.

The path of popular cinema.

Michael B. Jordan, Mila Davis-Kent and Tessa Thompson, in 'Creed III'.

In those Oscar awards for the best films of the year 1976, when John G. Avildsen picked up the award for best direction, winning no less than Alan J. Pakula, Sidney Lumet and Ingmar Bergman, he said on stage that many people had given things in life, but that Stallone had given him "his courage, his heart and his best chance."

Chartoff, one of the producers, thanked him "to be able to share a dream about Rocky."

And before everyone's praise, and after his silence in his thanks, Sly, convinced that he had made a film for the people, concluded in the last sentence of the ceremony: "And to all the Rockys in the world, I love

" .

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