Sylvester Stallone could not secure “Another One Bites the Dust” for “Rocky III,” so Survivor wrote “Eye of the Tiger” as its replacement

In his memoir Through the Eye of the Tiger, Jim Peterik recalls that in early 1982 his struggling Chicago rock band received the strangest voicemail in music history. He came home, saw the blinking light on his answering machine — still a novelty back then — and pressed play.

“Hey, yo, Jim. That’s a nice message machine you got there. This is Sylvester Stallone.”

Peterik assumed it was a prank. It wasn’t. He called the number back, and Rocky Balboa himself picked up.

The song Stallone couldn’t have

Here’s what Stallone didn’t lead with: Survivor wasn’t his first choice. It arguably wasn’t even his second. What he wanted for Rocky III was “Another One Bites the Dust” — Queen’s strutting bass-driven monster, the biggest-selling single the band ever had. And he didn’t just want it in theory. He’d already cut the film to it. When Stallone sent Survivor a rough cut of the movie, Peterik and his bandmate Frankie Sullivan watched the training montage with Queen’s bassline thumping under every punch — and it worked so well they called Stallone to ask the obvious question: why not just use this?

Because he couldn’t. The publishing rights weren’t attainable — Queen’s camp had said no. The perfect song was sitting right there in the picture, and it legally couldn’t stay. Which left two guys from Chicago staring at a montage cut to one of the most infectious grooves ever recorded, with a brief that boiled down to: beat Queen.

Peterik remembered the sinking feeling — this was going to be very tough to top. Their only option was to try.

Why Survivor, of all bands?

The wild part is that Survivor had no business getting this call. By 1982 they’d released two albums that had gone nowhere, and they were genuinely worried their label was about to drop them. But Stallone had heard a couple of tracks from their previous record and loved the tough, street-level sound — he wanted that energy for a movie about a champion who’d gone soft and needed to get hungry again.

So Peterik and Sullivan did something clever: instead of writing a song near the movie, they wrote it into the movie. Peterik started chopping out that now-famous dead-string guitar riff — chunk, chunk-chunk-chunk — timed to the actual punches they were watching on screen. The song’s whole rhythmic skeleton is the fight choreography. Even the title came from the film itself, lifted from Apollo Creed’s advice to Rocky about getting back the eye of the tiger. Within about three days, the song had taken shape.

The replacement was ready. Now it just had to do the impossible.

Another one bites the dust, indeed

“Eye of the Tiger” didn’t just fill the hole Queen left — it detonated. Six straight weeks at No. 1 in America and fifteen weeks in the top 10. It finished second on Billboard’s 1982 year-end Hot 100 ranking, a Grammy winner, an Oscar nominee, and a No. 1 hit in country after country around the world.

The replacement became one of 1982’s biggest singles. Commercial comparisons with Queen’s wider 1980s catalogue depend on the market and metric used, and “Another One Bites the Dust” itself remains an obvious counterexample.

And Survivor, the band on the verge of being dropped, became a household name overnight — all because the right song was unavailable and a movie star was willing to cold-call strangers from the phone book of rock.

The night Queen came to check

The best coda in this whole story is barely known. According to Frankie Sullivan in an interview republished by Louder, Brian May — Queen’s own guitarist — attended a Survivor concert in Los Angeles in 1984. He had heard the story that Rocky III was originally cut to Queen’s song before “Eye of the Tiger” took its place, and he asked Sullivan whether it was true.

It was true, Sullivan told him. All of it.

There’s something perfect about that image — one of the greatest guitarists alive, coming out to size up the band that got the job Queen passed on. Rocky III is a movie about a champion learning the hard way that there’s always somebody hungrier waiting for their shot. Turns out the soundtrack learned it first.

Correction, 14 September 2026: This article previously dated Brian May’s appearance at a Survivor concert to 1982; Frankie Sullivan’s account dates it to 1984. The wording and source of Jim Peterik’s recollection of Stallone’s voicemail have also been corrected and identified.