Creed: legacy franchising, race and masculinity in contemporary boxing films

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways in which director Ryan Coogler’s 2015 film Creed reactivates the Rocky franchise and provides an actualization of the themes of race and contemporary masculinity inherent in American boxing cinema. By defining Creed as a legacy film, a method of franchise nostalgia concerned with inheritance, we explain how the movie constitutes a passing-of-the-torch ritual in Hollywood. If Stallone’s Rocky gave audiences a glimpse into Italian-American working-class identity and Cold War politics distilled in the boxing ring, Coogler’s Creed delves into contemporary black identity and inner-city experience in Philadelphia. We trace a brief genealogy of mainstream American boxing films in terms of how they portray masculinity and racial identity and then explore the particular narrative and symbolic elements that are transferred from Rocky to Creed. Via this case study, we describe a wider industry trend in Hollywood in which burnt-out or dormant franchises are revitalized for contemporary global audiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Boxing films
• genre
• legacy film
• race
• masculinity
• Hollywood franchises

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

César Alberto Albarrán-Torres

César Alberto Albarrán-Torres is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology (Melbourne), where he teaches Popular Culture of Asia and Global Screen Studies. He has been widely published in academic and non-academic titles as a film and literary critic, author and translator. He is the editor of Senses of Cinema. His book Digital Gambling: Theorizing Gamble-Play Media was published by Routledge in 2018.

Dan Golding

Dan Golding is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University, where he teaches Screen Studies. He is also a writer, a composer, the co-author of Game Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, the Fight for the Future of Videogames (with Leena van Deventer), and the author of Star Wars After Lucas (UMP, 2019).