Scene of the Week: Desert Training Montage

I don’t want to say something unfounded like 1976’s Rocky invented the training montage, but it doesn’t take a trip to the film archives or countless hours of interviews with film historians to know that Rocky sure as hell popularized the training montage.

The training montage would go on to become staple of action movies and televised combat sports… would that have been the case without Rocky?! I don’t think so.

But even if other movies and forms of media over the past four decades did not pick up on the training montage trend, there’s no way a movie like Creed 2… an extension of the Rocky franchise starring Rocky Balboa himself, Sylvester Stallone… could get away with not including an epic training montage.

In Creed II, our hero Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) is preparing for his fight with Viktor Drago… the son of Ivan Drago aka the guy that killed Adonis’ dad Apollo back in Rocky IV. And much like the iconic Rocky IV training montage… we see our hero preparing for his fight by training under extreme climate conditions.