I Play Rocky is the Amazon MGM Studios biographical drama from Academy Award-winning director Peter Farrelly, written by Peter Gamble, that dramatizes the tumultuous making of the 1976 boxing classic Rocky. Anthony Ippolito stars as a young Sylvester Stallone, alongside Stephan James as Carl Weathers, AnnaSophia Robb as Sasha Czack, Matt Dillon as Frank Stallone Sr., P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell as producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, Kiki Seto as Talia Shire, Jay Duplass as director John G. Avildsen, plus Tracy Letts and Robert Morgan.
From here on, this article is about the music — and the honest position is that very little of it is nailed down yet. Half a century after Bill Conti‘s Rocky score gave American cinema one of its most recognizable fanfares, a film about the making of that movie arrives with no announced soundtrack album, no published tracklist, and no studio-confirmed composer credit. Below is a full breakdown of what is verified, what is reported but unconfirmed, and what is still pending as of July 17, 2026.
I Play Rocky Soundtrack Details
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Film Title | I Play Rocky |
| Director | Peter Farrelly |
| Writer | Peter Gamble |
| Studio / Distributor | Amazon MGM Studios (United States); Entertainment Film Distributors (UK & Ireland) |
| Production Companies | Baha Productions, Fireside Films |
| US Theatrical Release | Limited: November 6, 2026 (per Amazon MGM’s newsroom and Deadline) — see release date note below; Wide: November 20, 2026 |
| Streaming Platform | Not announced |
| MPA Rating | PG-13 (strong language, brief sexual material, smoking) |
| Composer | Dave Palmer — listed by TMDB/Letterboxd; not confirmed by Amazon MGM or Film Music Reporter |
| Soundtrack Label | Not announced |
| Soundtrack Release Date | Not announced |
| Total Tracks | Pending |
| Album Runtime | Pending |
Release date note: Amazon’s own newsroom post (July 15, 2026) and Deadline both place the limited opening on November 6, 2026, with a wide expansion later in the month. However, the April 2026 Amazon MGM/Park Circus/Fathom Entertainment press release for the Rocky 50 re-release states the film opens nationwide November 20 with a limited release November 13 — and Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, Box Office Mojo, and Amazon’s own official film page still list November 13 for the limited opening. This discrepancy has not been resolved by either party. This article leads with the more recent November 6 date while documenting the conflict.
I Play Rocky Soundtrack Overview
As of July 17, 2026, no soundtrack album for I Play Rocky has been announced or released. No label has been attached, no release date has been set, and no tracklist exists in any form — official or otherwise.
This is a verified absence rather than a gap in reporting. Film Music Reporter, the trade outlet of record for scoring assignments and album announcements, maintains tag pages that aggregate every article it publishes about a given filmmaker or composer. Its Peter Farrelly tag page currently runs from 2011 through the April 2026 Balls Up soundtrack playlist item and contains no entry for I Play Rocky. The same is true of its Dave Palmer tag page. FMDB, the soundtrack release database, likewise returns no release for the film. For a movie roughly four months from theaters, that silence is normal — score albums for November titles are typically announced in September or October.
What makes the music of I Play Rocky worth watching is the subject matter. The film depicts the production of a movie whose score became inseparable from it. Bill Conti‘s Rocky: Original Motion Picture Score was released on November 12, 1976 by United Artists Records, running 31:25. Its centerpiece, “Gonna Fly Now” — composed by Conti with lyrics by Carol Connors and Ayn Robbins, performed by DeEtta West and Nelson Pigford — reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song at the 49th Academy Awards, and was later placed 58th on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Songs list.
Whether I Play Rocky licenses Conti’s original recordings, commissions new arrangements of his themes, or keeps its distance entirely is not something any source has addressed on the record. Nothing has been announced about the film’s relationship to the 1976 music.
Who Composed the I Play Rocky Soundtrack?
The composer credit is reported but not confirmed.
TMDB lists Dave Palmer as the composer of I Play Rocky, and that credit appears on Letterboxd, which draws its film data from TMDB. No other source corroborates it. IMDb, Box Office Mojo, Rotten Tomatoes, and Wikipedia all list the film’s crew without any music credit. Neither Amazon MGM Studios nor Film Music Reporter has announced a composer. Because TMDB is community-edited, this credit should be treated as plausible and unverified rather than settled.
It is, however, highly consistent with the director’s track record. Palmer has scored Farrelly’s last three features and worked with him on television, which would make I Play Rocky their fifth collaboration.
About Dave Palmer
Dave Palmer (born November 8, 1968, in Denton, Texas) is an American composer, pianist, keyboardist, producer, arranger, and musical director based in Ojai, California. He began performing professionally at seventeen in jazz and rock venues in Norfolk, Virginia, and Dallas, before studying at the University of North Texas — a school known for its jazz program — and relocating west through Seattle and San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Palmer built his reputation as a session and touring musician long before he built one as a composer. He has recorded or performed with Fiona Apple, Air, Seal, Fleetwood Mac, Aimee Mann, Chris Isaak, Joe Henry, Solomon Burke, Turin Brakes, Tegan and Sara, Avenged Sevenfold, Kanye West, Portugal. The Man, Empire of the Sun, T-Bone Burnett, and De La Soul — the last of which brought him a 2016 Grammy nomination for the album And the Anonymous Nobody. He also served as musical director for a three-night sold-out Beatles tribute at the Hollywood Bowl.
His scoring career runs through two main channels. The first is his long association with composer Brian Reitzell, for whom he has played and co-written on Red Riding Hood, 30 Days of Night, Friday Night Lights, Stranger Than Fiction, The Brothers Bloom, Goats, Boss, and NBC’s Hannibal. That relationship produced his breakout credit: Palmer co-composed the score for Mike Mills’ Beginners (2010) alongside Roger Neill and Reitzell, on an Academy Award-winning film.
The second channel is Peter Farrelly. Palmer scored Loudermilk, the comedy-drama created by Farrelly and Bobby Mort that ran three seasons and thirty episodes from 2017 to 2020, and The Now, the Farrelly brothers’ Roku Channel series. He then scored Farrelly’s features The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022) for Apple TV+, Ricky Stanicky (2024), and Balls Up (2026), both for Prime Video. Away from Farrelly, he has scored documentaries for filmmaker Dana Brown, including On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter and Dust to Glory 2, and leads the jazz project The Duo Trio with drummer Jay Bellerose.
One pattern from that history is worth flagging: no score album was released for Balls Up despite Amazon Music publishing a 25-track licensed-songs playlist at the film’s April 2026 premiere. Palmer’s Farrelly scores have not historically received standalone album releases. That precedent does not determine what happens with I Play Rocky, which is a prestige theatrical title on a different release track, but it is relevant context for anyone expecting an album.
I Play Rocky Official Tracklist
No official tracklist exists. No score album, song album, or streaming playlist has been announced or published for I Play Rocky by Amazon MGM Studios, Amazon Music, or any record label.
This section will be updated when an album is announced. Any tracklist for this film currently circulating online is not sourced from an official release.
Score Highlights
Not available. Score highlights require either a released album or a released film to describe. Neither exists yet, and I Play Rocky has not screened publicly — its world premiere has not yet taken place, and the first footage shown to general audiences will be an exclusive first-look scene attached to the Rocky 50 theatrical re-release, running November 7–11, 2026 across participating theaters from Amazon MGM Studios, Park Circus, and Fathom Entertainment.
Writing cue-by-cue descriptions from a track title list or a plot summary would be invention, not reporting. This section will be filled in once the score is available to hear.
I Play Rocky Licensed Songs / Needle Drops
No in-film needle drops have been confirmed. The film is unreleased, and no music supervisor credit, song list, or scene-level music placement has been published by Amazon MGM Studios or reported by any trade outlet. Tunefind, WhatSong, and SeekerTune have no entries for the film, which is expected for an unreleased title.
Trailer music (unconfirmed, and separate from the film): The official trailer premiered on July 15, 2026. The community wiki TV Tropes describes the trailer as using a dramatic remix of “Gonna Fly Now”. This has not been confirmed by Amazon MGM Studios, a trade outlet, or a trailer music house, and TV Tropes is user-edited, so it is noted here as a report rather than a fact.
Two cautions apply regardless. First, trailer music is routinely different from in-film music — cues licensed or commissioned for marketing frequently never appear in the finished picture. Second, even if a “Gonna Fly Now” arrangement is confirmed in the trailer, that tells us nothing about whether Conti’s themes appear in the film itself.
Dave Palmer Composer Filmography
The credits below are verified. The I Play Rocky line is included for completeness and is flagged as unconfirmed.
| Year | Title | Format | Credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Beginners | Feature film | Score co-composer (with Roger Neill and Brian Reitzell) |
| 2017–2020 | Loudermilk | TV series (Audience Network / Prime Video) | Composer — 3 seasons, 30 episodes |
| 2021 | The Now | TV series (The Roku Channel) | Composer |
| 2022 | The Greatest Beer Run Ever | Feature film (Apple TV+) | Composer |
| 2024 | Ricky Stanicky | Feature film (Prime Video) | Composer |
| 2026 | Balls Up | Feature film (Prime Video) | Composer |
| 2026 | I Play Rocky | Feature film (Amazon MGM Studios) | Composer — reported by TMDB, not officially confirmed |
Where to Listen to the I Play Rocky Soundtrack
There is currently nowhere to listen — no I Play Rocky soundtrack has been released on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, or any other platform, and no album has been announced. The film itself opens in US theaters in November 2026 through Amazon MGM Studios, and while a later Prime Video release is a reasonable expectation given the studio, no streaming date has been confirmed. In the meantime, Bill Conti‘s original Rocky: Original Motion Picture Score — the album that gave the world “Gonna Fly Now” — is widely available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music, and the Rocky franchise itself can be bought or rented on Prime Video.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who composed the I Play Rocky soundtrack?
Dave Palmer is listed as the composer by TMDB and Letterboxd, but the credit has not been confirmed by Amazon MGM Studios, Film Music Reporter, or any trade publication, and does not appear on IMDb or Box Office Mojo. Palmer is director Peter Farrelly’s regular composer, having scored The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Ricky Stanicky, Balls Up, and the series Loudermilk and The Now, which makes the credit plausible — but it remains unverified.
Has the I Play Rocky soundtrack been released?
No. As of July 17, 2026, no soundtrack album has been announced or released, and no label or release date has been attached to the film.
How many tracks are on the I Play Rocky soundtrack?
Unknown. No tracklist has been published, so no track count or album runtime can be stated.
Does I Play Rocky use Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now”?
Not confirmed. The community wiki TV Tropes reports that the film’s trailer uses a dramatic remix of the song, but this has not been officially confirmed, and trailer music frequently does not appear in the finished film. Nothing has been announced about the film’s use of Conti’s original Rocky music.
When does I Play Rocky release?
Sources conflict. Amazon’s newsroom and Deadline (both July 15, 2026) state the film opens in select US theaters on November 6, 2026, expanding wide later in November — reported elsewhere as November 20, 2026. However, an April 2026 Amazon MGM press release, Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, and Amazon’s own film page list November 13 for the limited opening. The wide date of November 20 is consistent across sources.
Where can I stream the I Play Rocky soundtrack?
Nowhere yet, because no album exists. Bill Conti’s original 1976 Rocky score is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.
Is I Play Rocky connected to the Rocky 50 anniversary re-release?
Yes. Amazon MGM Studios, Park Circus, and Fathom Entertainment are bringing a 4K-remastered Rocky back to theaters as Rocky 50 from November 7–11, 2026. Those screenings include an exclusive first-look scene from I Play Rocky plus an introduction from the cast.