10 Franchises That Killed Off The Wrong Person
Why He Shouldn't Have Died:
It might be Sylvester Stallone's plucky pugilist who had his name up in lights in the title, but Carl Weathers as Apollo Creed was almost as important to the success of the Rocky series. It was Creed that Rocky fought in the first two films, eventually forming a friendship in the third... before getting killed off in the fourth, purely to demonstrate how much of a threat Dolph Lundgren's Ivan Drago was.
It's a waste of a great character even if it did give us a great foundation for the Creed movies being a legacy series borne out of the shadow of Apollo.
Who Should've Died Instead:
In that particular scene, anybody could've been killed off, if all the filmmakers wanted to show was what a threat Drago was. It might have been more interesting - and less of a bit of clear emotional manipulation - if Mr. T's Clubber Lang from the previous film went down. Rocky had mixed emotions about Lang, and holding him in his dying arms would've added some depth to that.