I Remember ‘Rocky’: My Front Row Seat to the Marketing of a Million-to-One Blockbuster — SkimNews
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- United Artists executives Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow resisted making Rocky and preferred Bob Chartoff and Irwin Winkler’s projects Comes a Horseman and Valentino; advertising director Howie Deutch was assigned to watch the dailies.
- Gabe Sumner, the advertising department head, was the person who believed in Rocky; only after the movie scored big at a Los Angeles preview did Mike Medavoy persuade United Artists executives to watch it.
- Gary Kalkin screened Rocky individually for critics and spent months arranging key interviews, with Guy Flatley’s New York Times piece serving as the launch pad; Vincent Canby nevertheless called it “absurdly oversold” and a “sentimental little slum movie.”
- Sylvester Stallone made starring in Rocky a deal-breaker: United Artists wanted his script but not him in the lead, even though he was unknown and barely scraping by.
- Rocky cost $1 million and did not open well initially; sales bookings in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. helped build a word-of-mouth engine that ultimately grossed $225 million worldwide and spawned five sequels plus the Creed spinoff movies.
- Rocky received 10 Oscar nominations and won the 1977 Best Picture race over Network, All the President’s Men, Taxi Driver and Bound for Glory; it also won Directing and Editing, while Bill Conti’s score went un-nominated.
Why it matters: Rocky’s $225 million outcome shows that its success did not come from effortless hype: United Artists resisted the film, The New York Times panned it, and the $1 million production opened poorly. The documented turnaround came when sales booked Rocky in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and momentum turned into a word-of-mouth engine.
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