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Would Rocky IV had made less money had it come out three years later?

posted 7 years ago by TMC-4 (20489)
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Rocky IV is the biggest box office hit of the series. I wonder if it benefited from coming out at the right time. To put things in comparison, in 1988, Sylvester Stallone came out with Rambo III, which immediately dated very poorly (and didn't come close to the success of the previous one, which was the second biggest movie of 1985 behind Back to the Future) because it came out at the tail end of the Cold War era. It just seemed a step behind to keep making the Russians the big bad guys by that point.

[–] AP (5295) 7 years ago

Yeah, by the late 80's US and Russian relations were slowly but surely mending. When this movie came out, there was a call for an end to the Cold War (hence the "If I can change, you can change" monologue), but there was still enough jingoism and ill feelings toward the USSR to make it work for its time. It really is a movie that could only have come out when it did.