# “This is going to be tough”: Survivor’s battle to top a 1980 Queen hit

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/this-is-going-to-be-tough-survivors-battle-to-top-a-1980-queen-hit/
- Published: 2026-11-15T04:00:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-11-15T04:20:20+00:00
- Original publisher: Far Out
- Original article: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/survivor-battle-to-top-a-queen-hit/
- Topics: Music

## Key points

- Queen declined Stallone’s request to use “Another One Bites the Dust” in *Rocky III*.
- Survivor wrote “Eye of the Tiger” in three days.
- The 1982 hit spent six weeks at number one in the US.

## Summary

Sylvester Stallone first asked Queen to let him use “Another One Bites the Dust” in *Rocky III*, but the band declined. He then commissioned Survivor to write an original, street-sounding song, giving the struggling group a chance to break through; the result, “Eye of the Tiger”, became closely tied to the film and its underdog story.

Survivor’s Jim Peterik and Frankie Sullivan saw a rough cut of the film with Queen’s song already matched to the boxing scene and feared it would be hard to beat. They shaped the track around a sharp guitar riff in three days. Released in 1982, it became the band’s first number-one hit, spending six weeks atop the US Billboard Hot 100 and ranking as the year’s second-bestselling single; Sullivan wrote it using a guitar with a repaired headstock.

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Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.