Hulk Hogan Reveals Why His Planned Biopic Failed

The name Terry Gene Bollea will probably not mean that much to you unless you’re a proper fan, but the name Hulk Hogan probably will. And yes, they are the same person, the two of them. Hulk Hogan is a former professional wrestler with a famous career path, but also a very popular celebrity.

Back in 2019, it was announced that a Hulk Hogan biopic was in the works and that The Hangover and Joker director Todd Phillips was attached to direct, with Chris Hemsworth set to play Hogan. The film has been in developmental hell for years before, earlier this year, Phillips confirmed that the movie had been scrapped.

Hogan was recently a guest on the PBD podcast, and among the topics discussed there was the canceled movie. Hogan was asked about the cancelation and the former wrestler revealed what actually happened and why the movie ended up being scrapped despite it having a finished script.

The life of Hulk Hogan is definitely interesting. He is one of the most famous professional wrestlers and a celebrity with a lot of followers. Even after he retired, his personal life has often been in the center of media attention, which is why it doesn’t surprise us that someone came up with the idea of making a movie about Hogan.

This was confirmed back in 2019. Todd Phillips was attached to direct the movie, with the wrestler being portrayed by MCU alumn Chris Hemsworth. But, after being in developmental hell for years, the movie was ultimately canceled, a fact that Todd Phillips confirmed earlier this year: “I love what we were trying to do, but that’s not going to come together for me.”

Earlier, Chris Hemsworth himself was very enthusiastic about the project, and while we don’t know how he reacted to the cancelation, we know what he said while it was still being made: “This movie is going to be a really fun project. As you can imagine, the preparation for the role will be insanely physical. I will have to put on more size than I ever have before, even more than I put on for Thor. There is the accent as well as the physicality and the attitude.”

When this was announced, Hogan also commented on the cancelation, but he provided no details about the reasons:

It was a situation where business-wise, Netflix kind of missed the date, you know, as far as a business situation. And so I had the choice at that time to switch gears. All of a sudden, there was a business glitch, you know, and then they tried to fix it a few days later. And I’d already decided to move on. My life rights and stuff are somewhere else now. Hopefully, Todd Phillips and Chris Hemsworth will still want to play. There’s still a huge opportunity there.

Source: IGN

We were still in the dark then, but the wrestler finally shared the details on why the project was canceled in the podcast we linked above. Here is what he said:

They kind of missed a beat in the contract. Yeah [when Patrick Bet-David said Netflix screwed up]. There was a payment that wasn’t placed at the right time. The script was amazing. Scott Silver, who wrote the script for ‘Joker’ ‘Wolf of Wall Street,’ a bunch of other movies, said, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever written.’ When I read it, I’m like, oh my god, this is really good.

At the time, I was in a space where I told him the positive stuff about wrestling. Spent about three years with this writer going back and forth, and when I read it, it was just very, very dark, if that would be the right word, but it was probably what the public may want to see. When I read it, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, if this thing comes out,’ there was talk that Chris Hemsworth had never played a real person before and he could probably win an Oscar, this thing is so powerful.

I said, ‘That’s great, everybody’s gonna do really great,’ then I’m gonna be left here alone, and that might be the last thing people remember me for, so I just was moving forward at the time, and when they business-wise missed a date, there was an option for me to pull out, and I did. I pulled out. This has no check and balance system [like a documentary]. What it did do, it took me right up to the time I turned bad guy, until I turned to Hollywood Hogan and went to WCW.

So if this movie did blow through the roof like they expected it would, then there would be another one, which would be really cool. Reasonable creative input is not the same as creative control. [I would prefer] creative control. I would be very fair, but it has to be a balance. It can’t just be lopsided, evil, evil, evil wrestler.

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