July // 2026
Where Was I Play Rocky filmed? Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey and Los Angeles
I Play Rocky
Anthony Ippolito was spotted outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art on November 20, 2025, in a grey sweatsuit, sprinting up 72 stone steps. The same steps that Rocky Balboa ran up in 1976. The same steps that have had a bronze statue of the fictional boxer at their base since 1982. The same steps that millions of tourists climb every year, arms raised, Gonna Fly Now running through their heads.
For I Play Rocky — the film about the making of Rocky, arriving in cinemas November 6, 2026 — that scene at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was not recreation for its own sake. It was the production filming Stallone filming Rocky. A film about a film, shot in the city where both the original and the story behind it actually happened. Directed by Peter Farrelly (Green Book), with Anthony Ippolito as a young Sylvester Stallone, the production shot across three cities between October and November 2025: Philadelphia, New York City, and Los Angeles, with additional work in Jersey City, New Jersey.
The Rocky Steps, Philadelphia Museum of Art
On November 19 and 20, the production descended on the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Benjamin Franklin Parkway — one of the most recognisable film locations in American cinema history.
The original Rocky steps sequence was filmed in a single day in 1976, with a crew of fewer than ten people and a budget that barely covered the camera. The production of I Play Rocky required considerably more infrastructure to recreate it — but the location is identical.
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Philadelphia
Beyond the museum steps, Philadelphia was central to the production for a specific reason: it is where the Rocky story actually happened. Stallone wrote the screenplay in three days in 1975, inspired partly by a Muhammad Ali fight, and pitched it to studios who wanted a star — not a broke unknown — in the title role. The city's working-class neighbourhoods, its Italian-American community, its gritty 1970s street life — all of it is embedded in the original film, and all of it needed to be recreated for a production set fifty years in the past.
New York City, Jersey City and Los Angeles
New York City provided the executive suites, the studio meetings, the rejection scenes — the Hollywood machinery that kept telling Stallone he could sell the script, but not play the part. The production filmed across Manhattan locations appropriate to the 1970s entertainment industry world, with Jersey City providing additional urban texture and period streetscapes that doubled for New York's outer boroughs.
Los Angeles completed the geographic triangle — the city where United Artists finally agreed to Stallone's terms, where the deal was struck, and where the film eventually went into production in 1975.
Play Rocky arrives in cinemas on November 6 — fifty years after Rocky premiered on November, 1976.
SOURCE
Men's Journal // Amazon MGM // Movie Insider // Total Rocky
CREDITS
© Baha Productins, Fireside Films
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