AHC: Hulk Hogan has a Successful Film Career

One thing I've come to understand is that most everything has a premake. In the 80s and 90s, Hulk Hogan was trying desperately to have the kind of career Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson ended up having, and failed pretty badly. That's not to say The Rock's movies are all that great themselves, but they are far and away better, and the Rock is better in them, than Hulk Hogan and the ungodly number of one star and half a star type films he made. The Rock has a legitimate millions and millions of dollar movie career. Hulkster didn't manage to crossover into films, and the only acting he really ever did after a while was just cameos of Hulk Hogan in other films and TV shows.

So the challenge is to get Hulk Hogan to have a successful crossover into films and a successful film career. He doesn't have to be Olivia, but he does have to at least get to The Rock level of success.
 
Hogan can act. He played the lead role in Thunder in paradise and this wasn't actually that bad.

Perhaps if Hogan had started off in TV first, outside of wrestling, he might have been taken more seriously as an actor.

Vince McMahon would have never allowed it in the 80s though as Hogan was the main draw for the WWF at that time.
 
Maybe a comedic route akin to 'Thunderlips' in Rocky then a late 90's renaissance as a serious actor?

Hell, in an ATL he could be the main character in The Wrestler... (don't hold me to it! I love that film as it is).

To get him out of Wrestling early, he'd need an injury.
 
Not having Hogan join WCW in 1994 might be your best bet.
That or avoiding the 1996 heel turn and his involvement in the nWo (thus, no 'Hollywood' run or additional World Title reign/s).

The first option allows Hogan to concentrate primarily on his film career while making the occasional wrestling appearance in Japan, rather than working full-time for a North American company.
The second option means that Hogan's wrestling career doesn't get a new lease of life and he fades out of the main event scene (the big heel turn came partly because 'red & yellow' Hogan wasn't popular with the WCW fans, mostly because of his association with the WWF), thus making full-time dedication to his film career more likely.
 
Have Vince move into the realm of movies earlier on the level the WWE currently runs.

Films like No Holds Barred were written by the Hulkster and Vince on weekend Tequila benders. Invest in an actual writer and you might get something.

Though part of the problem is the Rock came to prominence during the Attitude Era when wrestling got lost a lot of its most cartoonish trappings (relatively speaking, its still ridiculous comic book fun) allowing a wrestling icon to legitimately turn up in 'proper' action movies. Hulk Hogan was a kid's entertainer, he would be a very odd choice for full blown action move, leading to his numerous halfway house roles in awful familyactionadventurecomedies.

Maybe when he heads to WCW and turns heel, if they do better in the Monday Night Wars, they can convince Ted Turner to bankroll some passable fun action movies.

Of course that requires some big changes to the management and writing staff but I think Hogan would have a more legitimate base in WCW than the WWE for such a movie career.
 
Hogan can act. He played the lead role in Thunder in paradise and this wasn't actually that bad.

Professional wrestlers are all basically actors that do their own stunts. Now that's not to say they are all good actors...

And I vaguely remember that show.
 
The problem is Hogan sort of set the mold for future wrestlers who got into acting, just not in the right way. The most dangerous thing for an actor is being typecast, and Hogan played to his stereotype in such a way that he could not be taken seriously after that. His first major film, No Holds Barred, saw him play basically…himself. After that nobody was willing to take a chance on him in a more serious role. I remember reading somewhere that when Bill Goldberg started getting into acting he said “I’m looking for a script like They Live and not Santa With Muscles”. They Live stared Roddy Piper in the late 1980s and was widely seen as a pretty good film (especially compared to what Hogan was doing). As a result, most wrestlers, in particular the Rock, were determined not to fall into the same trap that Hogan fell into.

With that being said, I think the Rock was a better actor anyways and it would have been hard to see Hogan duplicate that. The Rock knocked it out of the park when he hosted SNL, which is what really opened a lot of doors for him in acting. Hard to see Hogan playing opposite Travolta in Be Cool and pull it off nearly as good as the Rock did.
 
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