Jonathan Majors‘ single-handed domination of cinema in the early part of 2023, thanks to the fact he plays the villain in both Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Creed III, has led to a curious crossover between the MCU and the Rocky franchise. We’d expect Marvel diehards to dream up ways of tying the two together, but Majors himself was surprisingly outed as a hardcore fan theorist when he pitched the idea that Creed III‘s Damian is actually a variant of Kang the Conqueror.
Majors should now be feeling some vindication for his out-there notion as fans have uncovered proof that the Rocky universe exists within the Marvel multiverse after all, which seemingly makes Majors’ Kang/Damian connection canon. As the Rocky roadies over on Reddit have discovered, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa once had a very brief stint as part of G.I. Joe, during Marvel’s run of comics based on the iconic Hasbro property.
These G.I. Joe comics mostly occupied their own space, but there were crossovers with the mainstream Marvel world, with Joe member Quick Kick being trained by Shang-Chi. While Marvel, Hasbro, and Stallone ultimately weren’t able to make a deal that would keep Rocky in the G.I. Joe franchise, and therefore the Marvel multiverse, this tenuous link does plant the seed for Creed III to genuinely take place in the wider reality of the MCU.
After all, James Gunn recently made Go-Bots canon in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, which therefore brought the Transformers into the mix too, so there’s no reason we can’t look to other obscure Marvel Comics crossovers from the ’80s to fold the Rocky films into this multiverse as well. “It’s all connected” was the old tagline of the MCU, but it turns out that apparently meant all of pop culture.