Sylvester Stallone Announces Plan to Ruin ‘Rocky IV’, Releasing Directors Cut Without Paulie’s Robot

Rocky IV is an incredible movie that shows the Cold War through the fight between scrappy city kid Rocky Balboa and Ivan Drago, a monster of a man who has the backing of the entire Soviet government at his disposal. If you overlook that it’s essentially Reagan-era propaganda, the contrast is a clever way to bring Rocky back to its roots as a David vs Goliath tale after Rocky became the champion in Rocky II.

For the 35th anniversary of Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone is working on a director’s cut of the film, which I guess we can call The Stallone Cut. It sounds awesome.

Sounds awesome. It sounds awesome but it won’t be because Sylvester Stallone apparently hates everything that is good and pure in the world.

You see, the heart and soul of Rocky IV is the robot that Rocky buys his brother-in-law Paulie for his birthday.

Stallone replied to comments inquiring about the robot by saying “The robot is going to the junkyard forever. No more robot,” and “I don’t like the robot anymore.”

Now, far be it from me to wildly speculate, but let’s wildly speculate. The easiest explanation for why Sly wants to get rid of the robot is that people have made fun of it for 35 years and essentially think it killed the Rocky franchise as if it really had anywhere else to go at the time.

Stallone is probably embarrassed because he was really excited about the robot at the time because the robots SICO, was actually part of his son Seth’s autism treatment.

I’m not saying that removing the robot will completely destroy the soul of the film or anything, but if you have a choice between two versions of a movie, one with an awesome 80s robot and one without, which one would you choose?