The long awaited Hulk Hogan Biopic that involved Todd Phillips and Chris Hemsworth is now no longer happening, and the news comes right from Phillips himself, who revealed that the project doesn’t look to be coming together for him during an interview on his new project Joker: Folie a Deux. In the interview Phillips was asked about the Hulk Hogan biopic and said, “I love what we were trying to do, but that’s not going to come together for me.” That’s pretty much a wrap then, and it seems to never recovered after Netflix exited the project.
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A Fork in the Road
Hogan shed some light on the project’s status during an interview on Chris Van Vliet’s Insight, revealing that Netflix’s involvement had come to an end, blaming it on a business glitch that resulted in Hogan moving on. “It was a situation where business-wise, Netflix kind of missed the date as far as a business situation,” Hogan said. “I had a choice at that time to switch gears. My life rights and stuff are somewhere else now and there’s a lot of things that are getting ready to happen. Hopefully, [director] Todd Phillips and Chris Hemsworth will still want to play, there’s still a huge opportunity there.”
“Scott Silver wrote the script, he wrote the Joker and a bunch of other movies,” Hogan said. “Todd Phillips has done the Joker, Wolf Of Wall Street*, all of the crazy stuff that he did. The script came back and it was amazing because my favorite movies are like Scarface, Godfather, True Romance. It was there. All of a sudden there was a business glitch and they tried to fix it a few days later, and I had already decided to move on.
A Second Film
That’s not the only Hulk Hogan project currently in development though, as reports have confirmed that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Artists Equity Production Company has acquired a screenplay for a film titled Killing Gawker. The project would bring the real life legal battle between Hogan and Gawker Media to theaters, and the script is based on Ryan Holiday’s book about the real life story Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue. Charles Randolph, who was nominated for an Oscar for The Big Short, is writing the script, but no word on a possible release date or official casting.
The film is based on the courtroom drama that unfolded in 2012, which saw hogan sue Gawker Media for publishing a clip of a sex tape from 2006. Hogan sued Gawker Media for $100 million in damages for invasion of privacy, infringement of personality rights, and emotional distress, and in 2016 Gawker Media would agree to pay Hogan $31 million. It’s unknown whether we’ll see this Hogan project hit the big screen ultimate, but this one does seem to currently be on track.
What do you think of the current Hogan project? You can talk all things wrestling with me on Threads @mattaguilarcb!
