Chris Hemsworth to Play Hulk Hogan in Netflix Movie

What’cha gonna do, when Chris Hemsworth, runs wild, on you!

That’s right, the Thor actor is set to play WWE Hall of Famer Hulk Hogan in an upcoming biopic that will be delivered to exclusively to Netflix. Todd Phillips will direct the film and Scott Silver, who worked with Phillips on the upcoming Joker movie for DC and Warner Bros. is set to write the script. Hogan’s longtime friend and the former head of WCW, Eric Bischoff, is slated to be one of the producers on the film, alongside Hemsworth, Phillips and Bradley Cooper.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film will not encompass Hogan’s entire life, and will instead focus on his rise to stardom and the start of Hulkamania. In superhero terms, the film is going to tell Hogan’s origin story. The actual Hulk Hogan, real name Terry Bollea, will be a consultant on the project as well as an executive producer.

Hogan rose to fame in the late-1970’s and early-80’s in the American Wrestling Association (AWA). In the early-80’s, Hogan was lured away from the AWA by WWE boss Vince McMahon, who was beginning his national expansion of the World Wrestling Federation, which was primarily a Northeast wrestling promotion.

Hogan blossomed in the WWF (which later became the WWE) and became one of the most iconic stars in the history of pro wrestling. Hogan was the face of the WWF throughout the 80’s and early-90’s and was the catalyst behind McMahon’s expansion nationally, and then globally.

Hogan jumped to WCW, which was owned by Ted Turner, in 1994 and helped launch the “Monday Night Wars” in 1996, when Turner and Bischoff aired a new program on Monday nights, Monday Nitro, which aired opposite WWE’s flagship Monday Night Raw.

A babyface for almost his entire career, Hogan turned heel in 1996 and became one of the founding members of the NWO, which changed the face of the Monday Night Wars and helped launch WCW into the lead for a period of time (83 weeks), becoming the top wrestling promotion in the world. 

Hogan was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005. 

Hogan was suspended from the WWE Hall of Fame in 2015 after tapes surfaced where he made racists remarks about a man his daughter was dating. The remarks were captured on tape in 2012 and surfaced in 2015. You can probably expect elements of that to pop up in a completely different Hulk Hogan movie, the one that Francis Lawrence is developing, which centers on the Hogan/Gawker legal proceedings.

This past July, WWE announced that Hogan was reinstated into the Hall of Fame and he has appeared on WWE shows since his reinstatement.