The movie that got Hulk Hogan fired from the WWF
Professional wrestling has served as a gateway into the movie business for decades, but Hulk Hogan didn’t exactly manage to carve out a successful side-line as a thespian comparable to several of the names that followed in his wake.
Of all the grapplers to have tried their luck at making it in Hollywood, only three have ever accomplished it to sustained effect, and they’ve all come along fairly recently. Dwayne Johnson, Dave Bautista, and John Cena are all established and well-known stars, with countless others having tried and failed to make the same sort of impact on cinema.
No offence to Hogan, Andre the Giant, Jesse Ventura, Roddy Piper, Steve Austin, The Miz, Chris Jericho, or any of the others who dreamed of silver screen stardom, but at most, they managed to accrue one or two memorable roles at best. In the case of the former, he got his out of the way very early on when he was hired to antagonise Sylvester Stallone as Thunderlips in Rocky III.
Bringing all of his moustachioed charisma and perma-tanned menace to the part, Hogan makes for a suitably bulky and flamboyant adversary for the ‘Italian Stallion’ in an exhibition bout for charity, with the two remaining friends long after the end of production. In fact, it was Stallone who took the stage to induct his former on-screen nemesis into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005.
At the time, though, you were either a wrestler or an actor, and there was no middle ground. Hogan was employed by the World Wrestling Federation when Stallone first came calling, but promoter Vincent J. McMahon didn’t want his star attraction to be splitting his time between the squared circle and cinema, so he released him from his contract.
As Hogan explained to the aforementioned ‘Stone Cold’, McMahon wanted his main man to ignore the overtures of the film business, which he obviously did not. “The mindset back then wasn’t like it is now, that we want Stone Cold to do his TV show and we want Stone Cold to do Expendables and we want The Rock to do,” he said. “Back then, 1978-1979, if you were a wrestler you didn’t do TV, you didn’t go do a movie, if you were a wrestler you were a wrestler.”
It was far from permanent, to be fair, with Hogan returning to the WWF the year after Rocky III hit cinemas in 1982, and his profile had risen even further. The year after that, he was made the company’s champion and ended up changing the trajectory of his chosen profession forever when ‘Hulkamania’ started well and truly running wild, something that may not have even happened so rapidly were he not part of a very recent box office smash hit.
