HAMBURG, Germany

WHEN a team of Broadway veterans began pitching New York producers on turning the classic 1976 movie “Rocky” into a musical, the mere idea made people wince. Would it have a chorus of tap-dancing boxers? Fighters breaking into song in the ring? A musclehead made eloquent with rhyming lyrics, as he punches sides of beef in a meat locker?

“People couldn’t believe we didn’t see it as satire,” recalled the composer, Stephen Flaherty (“Ragtime”), one of several Tony Award winners developing the project.

Recruited by a very determined Sylvester Stallone, the original Rocky himself, Mr. Flaherty and his collaborators never tried to go the fashionable route of a winking sendup, like the musical “Xanadu.” But the chilly reception from Broadway backers knocked out “Rocky” until, the lyricist Lynn Ahrens said, “these crazy German people showed up.”

They were executives from Stage Entertainment, the leading European presenter of musical spectacles like “The Lion King” “Mamma Mia!” and “Tarzan.” And they came eager to grow their multimillion-dollar empire — which specializes in retrofitting Broadway musicals (even flops) for audiences in Hamburg, Madrid, Paris and elsewhere into their native languages — and to develop more shows on their own. If “Rocky the Musical” struck some as the dumbest movie-to-musical yet, following recent Broadway flops like “Ghost” and “Leap of Faith,” “Rocky das Musical” held promise as the sort of testosterone-fueled event that can whip German audiences into a lather.