I would bet that there’s a large group of people who think about Philadelphia and immediately picture Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I know I do. I mean, Rocky is so synonymous with Philly that there’s a statue of Sylvester Stallone’s character at the actual steps he ran up. Now, that’s all fine, dandy and a great way to pay homage to one of the best sports movies. However, when it came time to make I Play Rocky, a movie about the making of Rocky, that statue actually caused problems.
Now, famously, Rocky was a hard film to make, and that’s shown in I Play Rocky. However, this project on the 2026 movie schedule had its own set of problems to deal with too. For example, when it came time to recreate the legendary moment where Rocky runs up the steps, the statue of Rocky literally got in their way, as director Peter Farrelly told me during an interview for CinemaBlend:
Well, there’s a statue of Rocky right where he has to go to, and the museum, for some reason, was like, ‘No.’ We ask, ‘Can we take it away? And we’ll move it back, and we’ll get it insured, and we’ll do everything.’ They’re like, ‘No.’ I think, ‘Well, we’re shooting there, you know, we can’t have the statue.’ They’re like, ‘Tough.’ That was a problem.
What’s ironic about all this is that a replica of the Rocky statue only made its way to the top of the steps in December 2024, per NBC Philadelphia. Then, as CBS News reported at the start of 2026, the Philadelphia Art Commission approved the relocation of the original statue that sat at the bottom of the stairs to the top. The original statue was finally put there this fall.
So, along with this movie having to ask to get a statue moved, there was just a lot of talk about moving generally going on around the same time period.
Anyway, in the case of I Play Rocky, they wanted to get the statue temporarily moved because obviously it was not there when Sylvester Stallone ran up the steps the first time while filming Rocky in the ‘70s. So, they did some digging and realized someone Farrelly knew had connections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as he told me:
And then somebody looked on the board of trustees for the museum, and Brian Roberts’ name was on there. Brian Roberts owns Comcast, that’s based out of Philadelphia, and Comcast owns Universal, the studio. But this isn’t a Universal movie, and I know Brian. I’d met him a couple of times. We did Green Book at Universal, and so I called Brian and said, ‘Hey, these people are being difficult. Can you? Is there anything you could do?’ He goes, ‘I’ll look into it.’
Brian L. Roberts, the chairman and CEO of Comcast, is a longtime supporter of the museum, and Comcast’s co-founder, the late Julian Brodsky, was a trustee. Clearly, Farrelly’s connection to Roberts turned out to be very useful. That’s because the morning after the director called him, the statue was gone:
And then the next morning we got there, and the statue was gone. So, yeah, he helped out. I like giving him credit. We gave him a thanks at the end of the movie, even though it’s not his movie.
I can say with certainty that the statue is not in the movie, as you can see when Anthony Ippolito’s Sylvester Stallone runs to the top of the steps and does the iconic pose you see in Rocky. And it’s entertaining to think about how this statue, which was put there to honor Rocky, had to be moved so this movie could honor Rocky.
Now, if you’d like to see the film that inspired the iconic statue at the Rocky Steps, you can stream Rocky with a Paramount+ subscription. If you’d like to see a movie about the making of Rocky (sans the statue), you can catch the well-reviewed I Play Rocky in select theaters right now and everywhere on November 20.
