'Creed II' has been winning over critics and audiences since its release in recent weeks. In the Irish box office, it opened at the number one spot last weekend.
Its success has called for whispers of a spin-off starring its supporting characters slash antagonists Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) and Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu). In the 'Creed' sequel, Viktor challenges Apollo (Michael B Jordan). The stakes are high and emotion is intense as Victor's father killed Apollo's father, Adonis, in the ring 33 years earlier.
The new movie gives much attention to the Drago-Drago storyline as they train for the upcoming match and face their own demons.
But how likely is a spinoff movie starring the characters to actually happen?
Well we sat down with the stars behind the father-and-son boxing duo, Dolph Lundgren and Florian Munteanu, to find out.
While Munteanu confirmed that there have indeed been "talks" of their characters getting a solo movie, Lundgren pointed out that the fact that their characters are Russian (Lundgren is Swedish while Munteanu is Romanian) would pose challenges.
Lundgren described learning Russian for 'Creed II' as "hell". "We had 40 lines in Russian in the original script," he said. "Maybe 20 are still in there, or something. That was tough."
Munteanu agreed: "With our accent, that was hard."
Lundgren continued: "They did say he [Munteanu] had a better accent than I did, but he worked more on it anyway."
Florian also said that one of his favourite scenes was an emotional one with Dolph and that the fact that it was in Russian ("this language is a real tongue breaker. You have to focus on almost perfect pronunciation and it was tough, very tough. It took a lot out of us.") made it all the harder.
Upon being asked about whether a spinoff could happen, Lundgren again emphasised the challenges of the language and accent. He said: "Who knows? It's just the Russian language bit, how do we solve that? Maybe we'll go to Berlitz or something."
Munteanu was determined to leave thing positive though. He concluded: "There are some talks, so we'll see if we can make it happen. I think people would enjoy to see more of the Dragos. There's so much more to tell in my opinion. So let's see."
You can watch the interview here:
So in summary, the answer is maybe. A big maybe. But it's not a no!
