After its screening at the Rome Film Festival, where we covered it in our review of Rocky Sono Io, the Peter Farrelly film starring Anthony Ippolito, a recounting of how Sylvester Stallone created himself and his career 50 years ago with the first Rocky, will be in cinemas from December 31. In the meantime, Hollywood’s machinery has already kicked into gear to push the film toward the 2027 Oscar nominations: regarding Ippolito’s mimetic performance we have few doubts, but Variety reports exclusively a standstill concerning the screenplay.
Rocky Sono Io and the “bureaucratic” snag of the Oscar 2027 screenplay
In essence Rocky Sono Io is a true story, gathered and fictionalized by screenwriter Peter Gamble, drawing from several sources, reports, and statements released over the years, including from Sylvester Stallone himself. Gamble did not base the script on a single source, but the allusions to scenes from the original Rocky, along with the trademark itself, could theoretically push it into the realm of “non-original screenplay“, at least it appears the Academy is weighing that option. A technicality or a fear of protests? The deadline for studios to submit nominations is tomorrow, November 12, but Variety was unable to obtain confirmations from these rumors, because neither the Academy itself nor Amazon MGM Studios wanted to commit to the decision they will have already made as we write these lines. It is not the first time such ambiguities arise, at least for the Oscars, where there exists a distinction between the two types of screenplay: for sequels like Toy Story 3 the category “non-original” is chosen even though the script was written from scratch, and more recently the screenplay of Barbie faced the same fate, simply because it invoked a preexisting trademark. Even Damien Chazelle accepted that his script for Whiplash could be judged this way, because he sought funding by shooting a single scene that circulated at festivals before expanding the story into a feature-length film.
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