The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2022
Ladbrokes recreates Rocky's run with its players replacing the cast — Hollywood first
To behave like the entertainment brand it wanted to be, Ladbrokes rebuilt Rocky's iconic run with every character except Rocky played by its own players
Ladbrokes · neverland
What it had to solve
Ladbrokes, a UK betting brand, decided that to be taken seriously as an entertainment company it had to behave like one. It challenged itself to deliver a moment of pure enjoyment that would connect sports fans and players with the spirit of its platform line, 'We Play Together'.
How it works
In 2022 Ladbrokes went all-in on a new idea of itself. A UK betting brand that wanted to be taken seriously as entertainment knew it first had to behave like entertainment, so it set itself a task: deliver a moment of sheer enjoyment that sports fans and players would feel was theirs.
The idea was to reimagine one of cinema's most iconic moments, Rocky's run from Rocky II. Neverland, Ladbrokes' lead creative agency, kept the original footage and the Philadelphia backdrop but removed the original cast — everyone except Rocky — and replaced them with hundreds of characters from Ladbrokes' world of sports and play: sportspeople, drummers, dancers, drag queens, gymnasts and others.
In what the work describes as a Hollywood first, the new cast was shot on 1:1 sets matched to the original locations and inserted seamlessly back into the film, finishing on the museum steps with the line 'We Play Together'. The ad never told viewers the brand was entertainment — it put them inside an entertainment moment.
Why it lands
- The film embodied the platform line instead of stating it: 'We Play Together' became literally visible as players running together through a film.
- An iconic scene supplied instant recognition and emotion, so the brand did not have to build meaning from scratch.
- The technical ambition — replacing an entire cast — was itself newsworthy, so the craft carried the message further than the media plan alone.
- Keeping Rocky as the only original tied a beloved film to a present-day world of players, making the audience the continuation of the story.
What it did
The result was described in coverage as the biggest character replacement in Hollywood history and a world first in bespoke VFX — a 90-second film in which the audience's own world runs through one of cinema's most famous moments. The work is recorded in D&AD's awards archive.
What you can take
When a brand wants to mean something to its audience, do not say it — cast the audience in the story; real players inside an iconic scene make together visible.
Since then
The 90-second film launched on 18 August 2022, the day before the Anthony Joshua–Oleksandr Usyk fight, and ran across UK entertainment programming, Premier League football and YouTube, extending into Snapchat Lens-enabled posters and audio ads built on a re-recorded 'Gonna Fly Now'. Coverage described the production as a world first and the biggest character replacement in Hollywood history, and D&AD's awards archive records the work.
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