Tulsa King has become one of Sylvester Stallone’s defining late-career television roles, giving the veteran star a different kind of gangster story after decades of playing larger-than-life tough guys on the big screen. Since its 2022 debut, the Paramount+ series has followed Dwight Manfredi as he built an unlikely criminal empire far from his old New York territory. With Season 4 approaching, the show is now preparing to take Dwight somewhere much more familiar.

And just when Tulsa King was gearing up for another chapter in Tulsa, Paramount+ has delivered an update that changes the geography of the story altogether.

Paramount+ has renewed Tulsa King for Season 5 ahead of the Season 4 premiere on October 16, with the next season moving production and the story to New York. The shift is particularly fitting for Sylvester Stallone’s Dwight, a character whose identity has always been tied to the New York Mafia, even as the series built its first four seasons around his attempts to establish himself in Oklahoma. Production has now begun in New York after the series previously filmed in Atlanta.

The move also has a significant production-side dimension. 

“We’re excited to welcome the cast and crew of Tulsa King to New York State for its fifth season,” said Hope Knight, the CEO and commissioner of New York’s economic growth agency, Empire State Development. 

Variety also reported the casting expansion, with Stallone’s daughter Scarlet Rose Stallone, who has played Spencer across the first four seasons, promoted to series regular. Erik Palladino, Glenn Fleshler, Anthony Skordi and Nickola Shreli are also joining the series as regulars.

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The timing is especially interesting because Stallone is currently having one of those career moments where his past and present are colliding in unusually direct ways.

That collision becomes even more striking with I Play Rocky, the new film revisiting the unlikely journey that turned Sylvester Stallone from a struggling actor into the star of one of Hollywood’s most enduring franchises. Anthony Ippolito plays the young Stallone in Peter Farrelly’s film, which recreates the period when Stallone fought to get Rocky made and insisted on playing Rocky Balboa himself. The movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and is scheduled for a November theatrical release.

Stallone has admitted that watching his younger life recreated while he is still very much here gave him mixed emotions. During an appearance at 92NY while promoting his memoir The Steps, he joked that he initially wondered whether the project was “jumping the gun” because he was “not dead yet.”

But seeing Ippolito in character changed his reaction. Stallone recalled briefly thinking the footage was actually of himself before realizing how convincing the young actor’s performance was. New York could bring Dwight Manfredi closer than ever to the world that made him, while giving Stallone another stage on which to play with the gangster persona he has spent decades refining.

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What do you think about Tulsa King moving to New York for Season 5? Share your thoughts in the comments.