The Loop
It looks like Ivan Drago is preparing for a return to the ring
As America plummets into the permafrost of a new Cold War, so goes our action cinema. Seemingly overnight, the evil tech CEOs of the late 90s and the offensive middle eastern caricatures of the mid-aughts have been replaced by a familiar foe: The Russians.
From John Wick to Atomic Blonde, the ol' Red Menace has embedded itself in our pop-cultural zeitgeist once again, and now, if this otherwise unassuming workout video from Dolph Lundgren (AKA Ivan Drago) is to be believed, the Rocky franchise is about to follow suit:
Of course, there's certainly no shortage of debate about the best Rocky film. Most say the original, movie nerds go with Rocky III, and people who just took a huge bong rip tend to prefer IV. But there is no debate over Rocky's best villain: It's Ivan Drago—a lab-engineered Siberian killing machine with a crazy/hot wife and the weight of an entire continent's geo-political pride on his shoulders.
Now, 32 years later, it looks like he'll finally face the son of the man he killed in the ring and, after that initial awkwardness passes, probably team up with Rocky & co. to defeat a far greater evil. There's no release date yet for Creed II, but let's all hope it sees the light of day before Russia and America actually erase each other from the map (or, you know, merge into one election-rigging totalitarian superforce that sensors fact, polices thought, and jails individualism. Boy the future looks bright...)