Does This Topless Michael B. Jordan Insta Mean What We Think It Does?

Sylvester Stallone has been in this business long enough to know exactly how to push fans' buttons. Though that once was with photos of himself training, these days it's with a pic of his Creed co-star Michael B. Jordan, training shirtless as the titular Adonis Creed, while Stallone looks on behind him. With this one little Instagram post, he made us all wonder if we'd somehow missed the news that Creed 2 was filming already.

"Getting stronger !!! 2018 #Creed 2 #mgm #fitness #Rocky," Stallone wrote on Friday, echoing the song from that iconic Rocky training montage. Sadly, the photo is not, in fact, a shot from the set of the new movie but rather a still from the 2015 Creed.

"We are continuing to work on developing the sequel to Creed,” an MGM spokesperson told Variety after everyone got all hot and bothered. Translation: The studio is not yet ready to confirm that the sequel is happening, let alone filming next year.

Why not? We have to ask. Especially since Stallone, who wrote the original six Rocky movies, shared another Instagram in July showing that he'd finished writing a 439-page draft of the movie by hand and typing it out into 120 pages.

Though Stallone earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for reprising the iconic role that won him an Oscar back in 1976, neither Jordan nor the movie's writer and director Ryan Coogler was nominated for Creed. This seeming oversight was one impetus for 2016's reprisal of the #OscarsSoWhite protests. If the team did all return for a sequel, this could be a second shot quite worthy of a Rocky storyline.

Back in 2016, both Jordan and Coogler seemed game for the sequel.

"Having gone through the process and developed these characters, delved into this world, worked with these actors, I would love the opportunity to do something like that again and revisit these characters again," Coogler told IGN. "As long as it’s in a story that works and is as meaningful frankly to me as this one was."

Jordan has at least one suggestion for the follow-up.

"[H]onestly in Creed 1 we didn’t have a real villain I don’t think, so it would be kind of cool to have that antagonist character for Adonis to go up to and have some real animosity towards," he told IGN. "That would be pretty cool."