Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky had its world premiere Saturday night at the Princess of Wales Theatre, and by the sound of it, the crowd would not stop clapping. Both Deadline and Variety reported multiple rounds of applause through the screening, the kind of reaction that tends to precede a TIFF People's Choice run.

The film traces how a broke, largely unknown Sylvester Stallone talked a skeptical studio into letting him write and star in Rocky, the 1976 film that went on to win three Oscars including Best Picture. Studios wanted a name in the boxing trunks. Stallone wanted himself. According to Deadline, one scene has him turning down escalating offers, up to ten million dollars, unless he gets the lead. "I won't sell it for one million. Not ten million," the character says in the film, per Deadline's account of the screenplay by Peter Gamble.

Ippolito's breakout moment

The casting story has its own myth-making energy. Farrelly told the Princess of Wales audience that his casting agent called claiming to have found the lead, a then-unknown Anthony Ippolito who had shot three scenes on his own in his grandmother's basement. "I looked at it and the search was over," Farrelly said, according to Variety.

Ippolito, 27, from Long Island, broke out in Netflix's Grand Army and played a young Al Pacino in Paramount+'s The Offer, about the making of The Godfather. That makes this his second film about a young Italian American icon at the birth of a Best Picture winner, a coincidence Variety flagged as too neat to ignore. He told the TIFF crowd the physical and vocal transformation took, in his words, "upwards of a year and a half to two years."

Deadline went further, calling the performance uncanny enough that it barely registered as imitation, more inhabitation. Variety called it a star-making turn outright.

There is a deliberate echo here to Farrelly's own history. Eight years ago, Green Book won TIFF's People's Choice Award and rode that momentum to a Best Picture win. Variety noted the symmetry of Farrelly returning to the same festival with a film about a nobody who bet everything on himself.

The supporting cast is stacked. AnnaSophia Robb plays Sasha Czack, Stallone's first wife. Stephan James plays Carl Weathers. Matt Dillon shows up as Frank Stallone Sr., Tracy Letts plays a composite studio head who barks the line "Boxing pictures? Nobody makes boxing pictures," and Jay Duplass plays Rocky director John G. Avildsen. P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell play producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, both singled out by Deadline as standouts.

Farrelly has said he would not have made the film without Stallone's blessing, which he says he got. Whether that blessing extended to final cut or creative control was not addressed in either review.

Amazon MGM Studios has I Play Rocky opening in limited release November 6, expanding wide November 20, right as the year's awards conversations start to firm up. Whether TIFF's applause translates into actual nominations is the next thing to watch, and Toronto's own audience vote, expected before the festival wraps, will be an early signal.