The American Film Institute has completed the red-carpet section of its 40th annual film festival with two sharply different projects: a live-action account of Sylvester Stallone’s struggle to make Rocky and a decades-in-development animated detective story from Brad Bird. The pairing gives AFI Fest both familiar Hollywood history and an original genre experiment as it prepares to return to Los Angeles in October.
AFI said Friday that I Play Rocky and Ray Gunn will join the festival’s Red Carpet Premieres, all scheduled for the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. The institute also added 12 special screenings, expanding a program that includes films from Ava DuVernay, Diego Luna, Pedro Almodóvar and Martin McDonagh. The complete lineup is due September 29, with individual tickets scheduled to go on sale October 3, according to the AFI announcement.
The festival runs October 21 through 25 and marks four decades of AFI’s Los Angeles showcase. Its short-film program is recognized as a qualifying route for the Academy Awards in the live-action, animation and documentary categories, and it also qualifies films for consideration in British short-film categories administered by BAFTA and the British Independent Film Awards.
Two different roads to the red carpet
I Play Rocky, directed by Peter Farrelly, focuses on the making of the 1976 film and Stallone’s insistence that he play the boxer he created. Anthony Ippolito portrays the young Stallone, while the cast also includes AnnaSophia Robb, Stephan James, Tracy Letts and Matt Dillon. The drama premiered earlier this month at the Toronto International Film Festival and finished as the first runner-up for the festival’s People’s Choice Award, TheWrap reported.
Farrelly has framed the film as an underdog story about the creator behind an enduring underdog character. At Toronto, he told Reuters that Stallone’s refusal to sell the script without securing the starring role made the actor’s own career resemble the fictional arc he wrote. The original Rocky received 10 Academy Award nominations and won three, including best picture. Amazon MGM Studios is distributing the new film in the United States.
Ray Gunn arrives from a different corner of the industry. Bird’s animated feature blends science fiction with 1940s detective noir and stars Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits. The project predates Bird’s 1999 feature-directing debut, The Iron Giant, and remained in development for more than three decades. Bird described the concept to Netflix as a meeting of The Maltese Falcon and Buck Rogers. The service plans to stream the film beginning December 18.
The AFI screening will follow Ray Gunn’s world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 10, according to TheWrap. That sequencing makes the Hollywood event an early U.S. showcase for a film whose long development history has already become part of its public identity.
A broader festival program
The two gala additions sit inside a deliberately broad slate. Friday’s special-screening announcement included DuVernay’s 14th; Luna’s immigration drama Ashes; Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas; and McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine. Other selections include Behemoth!, Bunker, Clarissa, Elsinore, Josephine, The Man I Love, Mouse and Tangles. The additions bring established filmmakers, international work and independent productions into the same event framework.
The festival will open with the U.S. premiere of the stop-motion feature Wildwood and close with Being Heumann, Siân Heder’s adaptation of disability-rights leader Judith Heumann’s memoir. AFI’s closing-night notice says the drama stars Ruth Madeley and Mark Ruffalo and centers on the 1977 occupation of a federal building during the campaign for enforcement of Section 504 disability protections.
That range matters because AFI Fest serves several functions at once. It offers a public-facing Hollywood showcase, gives distributors another stop in the fall release calendar and provides qualifying exposure for short filmmakers. This year’s 40th edition also arrives after major fall festivals in Venice, Toronto and London, allowing Los Angeles audiences to see projects that have already begun gathering reviews and awards-season attention.
For I Play Rocky, the AFI slot extends a festival run built around a recognizable American film legacy. For Ray Gunn, it gives a long-delayed original animation a high-profile theatrical presentation ahead of streaming. The contrast is the clearest signal in Friday’s announcement: AFI is using its final red-carpet choices to pair Hollywood’s memory of how a classic was made with a filmmaker’s attempt to build a new world.
The practical details for moviegoers remain partly unsettled. AFI has announced passes, but the full program and screening schedule will not be complete until September 29. MyNewsLA reports that all gala screenings will be held at the Chinese Theatre complex and that individual ticket sales begin October 3. Until AFI releases the full calendar, audiences will know the marquee titles but not every scheduling choice or ticket availability.
