It's safe to say that Creed was the surprise hit of 2015. No one saw a seventh Rocky movie actually delivering something new and raw and stuffed with enough greatness to have it rival the original. And then on top of all that, Sylvester Stallone is a major awards contender, nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor! 

Like, what??

So of course folks are hot on a sequel, teasing a potential spin-off franchise that follows Apollo Creed's son, Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), on his quest to become a boxing champion. The word straight from MGM is that the studio is definitely making a Creed 2, and now Stallone is talking about the story ideas they've been tossing around -- ideas that include Apollo (Carl Weathers) returning to the franchise.

“Ryan has some ideas of going forward and backward and actually seeing Rocky and Apollo together,” Stallone told Variety. “Think of The Godfather II. That’s what he was thinking of, which was kind of ambitious.” 

Very ambitious. An idea like that would involve both Stallone and Weathers being passed off for their 1985 selves, or perhaps even earlier. (1985 was the year Rocky IV was released, which was the movie where Apollo died in the ring.) Stallone then went on to tease another potential Rocky IV connection when it comes to who Adonis' next opponent may be.

“You’ll have him face a different opponent, which I would say is a more ferocious, big Russian,” Stallone says. “You can start to meld my experiences and then you start to bring different cultures into it. And you can see what’s happening with the Russians today in America. The complication will come with the girl’s ambition, because she’s not Adrian. She has places to go, things to see, the clock is running on her hearing.”

Could Creed 2 directly connect to Rocky IV in more ways than one? Could Adonis' next boxing foe be related to Drago (Dolph Lundgren) in some way? Maybe one son takes on another?

Creed director Ryan Coogler is currently in talks to take on Marvel's Black Panther, a project that would likely take him off the Creed sequel, especially if they want to get rolling on it sooner rather than later. As for de-aging Stallone and Weathers, Stallone joked that there'd be a "CGI version of Sly," adding that Coogler would "find a clever way to make it work."

What do you think?