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National Film Vault

OFFICIAL FILM AUTHENTICATION BY CROWN GRADING
A
AUTHENTIC
CROWN CERTIFIED
Film cell NFV-000000290 Tap to enlarge
MOVIERocky III
SCENEROCKY III Opening Credits
FILM FORMAT35MM
YEAR1982
CERTIFICATE IDNFV-000000290
Film Record Public record
Directed by
Sylvester Stallone
Studio
United Artists · 99 min
Box office
$270M worldwide on a $17M budget
Honors
Golden Raspberry Award — 1 nomination
Scholarship
Named in the title of 1 peer-reviewed work
Examples
Sources: Wikidata · OpenAlex. The record of the motion picture, not an assessment of this cell.

FILM NOTES

Rocky III arrived in 1982 from United Artists, the third chapter in Sylvester Stallone's saga and a defining hit of the era's training-montage cinema. Building on the crossover success of its predecessors, the film introduced Clubber Lang and cemented the series as a cultural fixture, pairing box office dominance with the rise of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" as an anthem for underdog triumph. By this point Rocky Balboa was no longer just a character but an American symbol, and the film's opening stretch set the tone for everything that followed.

This piece comes from the opening credits, the sequence that greets audiences before a single scene of story unfolds, establishing music, pacing, and expectation. As a credits cell, it belongs to the ceremonial front matter of the film, the part built to signal scale and stakes rather than plot. For collectors, opening credits material from a franchise touchstone like Rocky III holds particular appeal, marking the exact threshold where the audience steps from anticipation into the world of the film itself.

This original motion picture film element has been examined and authenticated by Crown Grading in partnership with National Film Vault, and encapsulated for archival preservation.
Why so little survivesRelease prints were leased to theaters, not sold. When the run ended they went back to the distributor to be destroyed, and most were. What collectors hold today came from the prints that escaped that order, and no new 35mm prints of these films are being struck.
CROWN SERIAL 000059600