Rocky in Review, Part 5: The Creed Trilogy Is Wall-to-Wall Greatness

Finishing our series with three outstanding legacy sequels

On Thursdays for the foreseeable future, I’ll be publishing reviews of classic movies, pieces that have never appeared here before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). For our first set of films, we’re looking at the Rocky series, concluding today with the recent trilogy of ‘legacy sequels,’ the Creed films.

Creed - 2015, Dir. Ryan Coogler

Written for 200 Reviews based on notes written February 24^th, 2023

If one were to plot all “legacy sequels” on a line from least to most imaginative, insightful, and intelligent use of the franchise they are reviving, Ryan Coogler’s Creed and J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which initially released just weeks apart from each other, are very nearly on opposite ends of that spectrum (the actual opposite point from Creed is, of course, The Rise of Skywalker). As these kinds of film go, Creed is absolutely the platonic ideal – reviving the form of a beloved classic film series, but with a voice and message that is new, vital, fresh, and entirely of the moment. It is a nostalgia play, insomuch as we have collective nostalgia for Sylvestor Stallone’s Rocky and some of the franchise’s core signifiers (“Gonna Fly Now,” the steps to the Philly museum, etc.), but its nostalgia is a setting against which a story the earlier incarnations of the franchise couldn’t tell, and that’s where the magic lies – the missing ingredient most ‘legacy sequels’ never get around to finding.