The Best Wrestling Movies (That Aren’t About Wrestling)

The Oscars are right across the corner; the WrestleMania of the Hollywood calendar. Among the many movies nominated for this 12 months’s Academy Awards, there’s “Marty Supreme,” the story of a carny table-tennis player who’s laser-focused on achieving greatness in his area of interest sport, in addition to “Song Sung Blue,” the story of two singers who love one another almost as much as they love Neil Diamond. 

While the 2 movies couldn’t be more different in content, demographic, aesthetic, and any number of how, they do share two similarities: One has a tagline of “Dream Big,” while the opposite’s is “Dream Huge” (Crazy, right?), they usually are wrestling movies that are not about wrestling.

Wrestling is about greater than predetermined fights and spandex. It’s an element of a much larger world of carnies, con artists, showmen, and other artists; a world of sensory assault, paper-thin stories of fine and evil, and an understanding that the reality, even reality, is up for negotiation.

“Marty Supreme” and “Song Sung Blue” didn’t emerge from a vacuum. There’s a wealthy tradition of wrestling movies that are not about wrestling, and within the true spirit of skilled wrestling, it’s a practice that I made up.

This may not feature any movies which might be literally about wrestling. “The Wrestler” shouldn’t be on this list, neither is “The Iron Claw” or the classic “…All The Marbles.” No, this may cope with movies about acrobats, porn stars, magicians, tap-dancers, and yes, even table-tennis players and Neil Diamond tribute acts, all of which light a beacon of recognition in any wrestling fan, and may give wrestling cinephiles like Bronson Reed some movies so as to add to their Letterboxd watchlists.

If there’s one film that I hope everyone who reads this text watches, it’s Carol Reed’s 1956 film “Trapeze,” quite possibly probably the most any film could be about pro wrestling, without actually being about pro wrestling. 

Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis play acrobats who, when they are not fighting over Gina Lollobrigida, are determined to placed on the perfect trapeze act the world has ever seen. Lancaster is an old veteran whose body is already breaking down, and Curtis is a young hotshot who is set so as to add a 3rd spin to the mid-air somersault. Lancaster has tried it before, and it nearly killed him, and he doesn’t need to see Curtis go down the identical path. He thinks Cutis has what it takes to make the audience consider that “the circus is real,” like they did in the nice old days, but additionally thinks he takes too many risks.

It is a film that lays out the everlasting struggle within the hearts of wrestlers like Will Ospreay: The need to do the unattainable, and the constraints of physics and the human body. It’s a battle that has claimed the mobility of stars like Kota Ibushi, Dynamite Kid, or Kurt Angle. 

There’s nothing else on this list that might be quite as literal, relating to its connections to wrestling, as “Trapeze.” From the talk on adding a 3rd spin to an already-dangerous move, to the backstage politics of carnival folk, it is not hard to look at “Trapeze” and picture word-for-word reenactments within the AEW or WWE locker room. 

Bertolt Brecht believed that the more an audience is aware of a performance, the more they’re willing to consider. In spite of everything, what’s more trustworthy than a performance that has already told you it is a performance? Brecht would’ve loved skilled wrestling.

Call it “pre-determined.” Call it “kayfabe.” Call it “fiction.” Irrespective of what you call wrestling, it’s ultimately built on a lie. Hatreds and friendships are manufactured, emotions are manipulated, because it is every wrestler’s job to play with the audience like putty. 

Orson Welles’s 1973 film “F Is For Fake” is about magic tricks and forgeries, but its central conceit is that an audience has no good reason to trust an artist, even when that artist is claiming to be transparent. The audience desires to consider that there’s objectivity in Welles’s film/parlor trick, and Welles lets them consider until the very end.

It’s so much like “WWE Unreal,” or another reality show for that matter, the looks of transparency, despite all the standard machinations and manipulations of fiction.

You ever watch a match and began to wonder if the 2 wrestlers actually do not like one another? Every wrestling fan, at one point or one other, has said, “I’m completely aware that that is all staged, but there was some real animosity behind that punch/kick/promo/etc.”

Nine times out of ten, it’s all only a little bit of show, and that’s what makes wrestling, movies, magic, and another performance a lot fun. If you ought to get a rather higher idea as to why it’s that audiences are like that, “F Is For Fake” is the proper place to begin.

While skilled wrestling existed for many years before Ivan Drago and Rocky Balboa traded blows in Moscow, the 1985 feature film is basically the primordial ooze from which modern skilled wrestling crawled. The construct to the fight, the post-fight promo, and the black-and-white, good-vs-evil, America-vs-USSR tone of the proceedings have been copied, parodied, and pastiched by wrestling for the last 40 years.

I’m not glib enough to suggest that “Rocky IV” created the thought of the foreign heel. Ivan Koloff was riling up fans in MSG long before Sylvester Stallone began acting, and Nikolai Volkoff sang the Soviet Anthem at that 12 months’s WrestleMania, but there’s a cartoon simplicity to the film that was made for wrestling. 

All the things in regards to the way the film built up Ivan Drago as an unstoppable killer can be copied by the likes of Brock Lesnar, Heidenreich, The Great Khali, and literally every other wrestler over 6’5. Former WWE United States Champion Rusev and his wife Lana were doing a 1:1 recreation of Drago and his wife, until someone in WWE realized he was Bulgarian. Hulk Hogan, partially made a star by his cameo in Rocky III, principally spent the whole lot of 1985-1991 in Rocky IV mode, a contradictory mixture of humble underdog and super-powered star of electricity, possibly even with a robot butler.

To be honest, the complete Rocky franchise probably could’ve been put into this text, especially with how much CM Punk keeps going back to the “Rocky III” well, despite never watching the flicks, but Rocky IV is so baked into the language of skilled wrestling that you would be able to still see flashes of this maximalist blockbuster within the product even today.

If wrestling has been doing “Rocky IV” on screen for the last 40 something years, it has been doing “Strictly Ballroom” behind the scenes for even longer.

Baz Luhrmann’s 1992 dance film is a retelling of The Ugly Duckling, however the central conflict is between Paul Mercurio’s Scott Hastings and the ballroom dancing establishment itself. The establishment is firm in the idea that there are “no latest steps,” and Hastings is set to win ballroom dancing gold along with his latest steps.

How repeatedly have old wrestlers told young wrestlers to decelerate, just for wrestling luminaries like Dave Meltzer to remind them that their generation was told the identical thing by the generation before them, and so forth and so forth. Scott Hastings is any wrestler who dared to take the medium one step further. The Tiger Masks open the door for the Great Sasukes, who open the door for the Will Ospreays, who open the door for the Je’Von Evanses, and so forth and so forth, and all of the while, old men yell at clouds and tell them there aren’t any latest moves, no latest ideas, no latest steps. 

It is not just wrestling that is predetermined. The conman shenanigans that became wrestling traditions have existed in plenty of various types of entertainment, especially the Fifties quiz show. Where wrestling was capable of make the pre-determined nature of its outcomes a part of the entertainment, the invention that quiz shows were pre-determined caused such societal outrage that there have been hearings held. The controversy destroyed blue-blooded nepobaby Charles Van Doren, who gave up a cushy lifetime of academia for a shot at glory.

Robert Redford’s 1994 film “Quiz Show” is about Van Doren’s fall from grace, with Van Doren played by Ralph Fiennes, and it is the form of story any washed-up wrestler knows too well. He began to consider the gimmick. 

Despite getting answers prematurely for the show “Twenty-One,” Van Doren began to consider that he was the person he played on TV, as did the previous champion, Herb Stempel. When Stempel is humiliated by a straightforward loss, he breaks kayfabe and begins telling any and all that the fix was in and the show was rigged. 

Van Doren’s mind was as strong as any wrestler’s body. It’s entirely possible Van Doren could’ve been successful on this planet of quiz shows, or on the very least a minor figure in academia, but he was weak to the lure of stardom and the trail of least resistance. He tried to have his cake and eat it too when it got here to his success, and he’ll perpetually be referred to as a cheat.

John Turturro, as Stempel, is a vision of the shoot interviews that will turn into a staple of 2000s wrestling. Exposing the business, complaining that the guy who got here after him was only a haircut that the sponsors liked higher, Van Doren might as well be Hulk Hogan, and Stempel is any aggrieved veteran who felt slighted by Hogan’s dominance, or Reigns, or Cena, or any of the opposite franchise faces of wrestling.

Look, we want to have this conversation eventually, so let’s do it now: Wrestling is a sensual business. I would not go thus far as to call it pornographic, but the recognition of wrestling on sites like YouTube has as much to do with it being “porn-adjacent” as anything. It’s why WWE would upload a video of an exquisite woman getting smashed right into a cake every other week within the 2010s. They couch it in language like “It’s an aesthetic business,” nevertheless it stays scantily clad men and ladies grappling, sweating, respiratory heavy, and physically exhausting themselves, manipulating the emotions of an audience, specifically to get a “pop.” 

The old story goes that John Cena is who he’s today because Jim Barnett allegedly told him to stop wrestling in a shirt.

So obviously, the story of a young, athletic man taking up a silly name and being thrust right into a world of area of interest celebrity and cocaine goes to have a variety of parallels to the wrestling business. Dolph Ziggler has outright admitted to taking inspiration from Dirk Diggler in “Boogie Nights.”

I feel like Diggler’s arc is so stereotypically wrestling-coded that I’ll avoid it, to as a substitute speak about his mentor, Jack Horner. Horner is watching the porn world change over the course of the film. A bona fide storyteller, Horner watches as VHS and tape force pornography right into a business that’s becoming increasingly more reliant on shock, exploitation, and extremism than the storytelling that Horner felt made pornography great. 

WWE, and wrestling on the whole, would have an identical issue only a 12 months after the movie was born, because the Attitude Era did away with a lot of wrestling’s storytelling traditions, making a philosophical division within the business that also exists to at the present time. Heather Graham’s Rollergirl might as well be any woman’s wrestler who was forced to adapt to the cruel, exploitative world of wrestling post-Attitude.

Alright, if I didn’t lose you with “wrestling is porn,” then I’d lose you with this next one: Wrestling is insanely racist. It’s gotten higher through the years, but oh my god, man, I still do not forget that insanely racist ACH shirt. 

There have been Italians playing Arab terrorists, Irish wrestlers forced to step dance, countless Pacific Islanders treated as savage cannibals, and let’s not forget the complete run of Cryme Tyme. It could be easy to write down this off as a quirk of wrestling and its demographics, but there isn’t a racism in wrestling that’s exclusive to wrestling. It follows in a protracted tradition of American entertainment, from Looney Tunes to laundry commercials. Wrestling is vaudeville, and vaudeville often had some form of cursed minstrelsy. The wrestling business, just like the entertainment business, has often made wrestlers make tough decisions about how they’re presented, hence the inclusion of Spike Lee’s acrid, bilious “Bamboozled.”

It is a film that predicted the rise and fall of Dave Chappelle, a couple of years before “Chappelle’s Show” even existed. A frustrated TV author channels his frustrations on the state of racial politics on the turn of the brand new millennium right into a “Recent Millennium Minstrel Show,” meant to to satirize, but ultimately becomes a racist sensation, much to the enjoyment of a slur-slinging loudmouth network executive, resulting in a whole studio audience showing up in blackface to feel like they’re in on the joke.

Remember the Nation of Domination? Remember how they were a way for Black wrestlers to couch their frustrations with the racist “Good Ol’ Boy” world of wrestling, and America on the whole, right into a wrestling faction? Remember how they’ve principally been reduced to a meme GIF of a scrawny white guy doing a Black Power fist at them from the group? Remember the construct to Triple H and Booker T? Remember the time WWE decided to decorate R-Truth up like a Confederate soldier in Richmond and had him go on a complete rant about “seceding?” That is Bamboozled. It is the form of movie that you would be able to’t unsee, especially in the event you watch wrestling.

Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson doesn’t spend the primary act of “The Wrestler” getting stapled and bloodied only for fun. He doesn’t bring up “The Passion of The Christ” since it’s a timely reference. 

Every pro wrestling babyface desires to be Jesus Christ, whether or not they realize it or not. This is not blasphemy or sophistry. That is reality. The usual babyface performance in wrestling requires them to be beaten inside an inch of their life, before being willed back to life, resurrected in the event you will, by the fans, and triumphing over the evil heel. It’s a story built across the story beats of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, often known as “The Passion.” 

While depictions of Christ’s execution have often been graphic, especially in Catholicism, there has not been anything as gruesome as Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of The Christ,” where Jesus is ripped with barbs, whipped, broken, and bloodied for roughly 2 hours. Despite having horror movie effects that will put “Saw” to shame, “The Passion of The Christ” was accepted as a family film by much of the American viewing audience, and wrestling never quite recovered.

Gibson essentially turns Christ into the best deathmatch wrestler, suffering for our entertainment, and still walking away triumphant. Much of the drama of the film comes from watching a man start the movie with all of his skin and end the movie with much less skin. 

Randy “The Ram” was not talking out of his ass when he began talking about “The Passion.” While deathmatch wrestling has at all times been around in some form or one other, at lease because the Tupelo Concession Stand Brawl, the rise in popularity during the last 20 years may not be directly tied to the recognition of Gibson’s bloody passion play, nevertheless it no less than feels spiritually tied to it, because it pushed the overton window barely enough to see guys like Nick Gage slicing people open with pizza cutters on cable TV, complete with a Domino’s ad to go with it.

I’m not entirely sure tips on how to speak about “The Prestige” and the way it pertains to wrestling without spoiling one in every of the most important parts of the movie. Consider yourself warned.

There are two ways to be a wrestler: You possibly can either learn the discipline, live the lie, and follow the principles of your art, or you’ll be able to exit on the leading edge and risk killing yourself night after night to listen to the applause. 

To place it even simpler: You possibly can be MJF, or you’ll be able to be Darby Allin; Alfred Borden, or Robert Angier.

In “The Prestige,” Alfred Borden shouldn’t be one man. He is 2 men, sharing one life, so disciplined to magician’s kayfabe that they miss time with their families, and only relish within the roar of the group when it’s their scheduled turn to achieve this. There’s nothing real about Alfred Borden’s magic act because there’s nothing real about Alfred Borden, and magic is just that, an act, as that’s what magic has been because it began. Such is MJF, the heir apparent to Randy Orton and all the opposite “work smarter, not harder” wrestlers of the past.

Robert Angier is only one man, attempting to make his act as “real” as possible. Magic is real. The roar of the group is real. It is likely to be an act, nevertheless it’s real to Angier. He desires to bask within the applause every night, and if he cannot, then he’d reasonably drown in a box like his dead wife. Very like Allin, Angier is chasing some form of thrill, as much as he’s attempting to be a working magician.

The rivalry between these two men and their outlooks is so strong that it leads them to invent, reinvent, and adapt. The Borden Twins definitely would not have the act they do in the event that they weren’t attempting to compete with Angier’s mania, and Angier would just be some wealthy brat if he weren’t attempting to sustain with disciplined magicians like The Borden Twins. “The Prestige” is a movie about madness and magic, and where the road between the 2 is, and in that way, it should probably be required viewing in every wrestling school.

Every wrestler is attempting to sell you something. It’s why literally every aspect of the performance is labeled “selling.” There isn’t a promotion they will not work for. No place they will not travel to. Even CM Punk went back to WWE and even traveled to take the Saudi Arabian paycheck for which he had graphically lambasted The Miz just years earlier. There’s nothing a wrestler won’t do for money. Yes, even the one you are pondering of straight away, who was so nice to you. Were you on the merch table? In fact, you were a possible sale.

It is a straightforward incontrovertible fact that 95% of all heartbreak experienced by wrestling fans centers on the incontrovertible fact that wrestling is a job, and money wins out. Mad that a wrestler said one thing but did one other? Money. Sad that an organization won’t take a likelihood on an unproven talent? Money. Offended that wrestling fandom requires increasingly more streaming subscriptions? Money. 

Enter Jordan Belfort, the cartoonishly greedy most important character of “The Wolf of Wall Street.” The film is basically three hours of Belfort endearing himself to the viewer by telling them every secret, thought, and impulse, after which breaking their heart over and all over again for profit. He eventually gets an off-ramp, a likelihood to money out and get away clean, and what does he say?

“I’m not leaving.”

The moment has been memed to death, but I can not help but consider it any time a wrestler puts money before principles. 

I’ve already covered the “Wrestling As Pornography” within the “Boogie Nights” section, so as a substitute, I’ll use Ninja Thyberg’s “Pleasure” to debate the inherent objectification in wrestling. If “Boogie Nights” is the cocaine and success myth, then “Pleasure” is stark reality, where the industry is a meat market, trading broken, damaged people like chattel.

In each porn and wrestling, and admittedly most industries, women get the s*** end of the stick, forced into positions their male counterparts would never be, infantilized one moment, blamed for his or her indignities in the subsequent. “Pleasure” puts you right in the pinnacle of a young woman, attempting to make it in an overcrowded business.

Porn producers are reduced to nothing greater than glorified pimps, and friendships that only last until one person has a shot at success. In a world where many struggling indie wrestlers often live together and make OnlyFans content together, there are numerous dark parallels to Thyberg’s tale of 1 young Swede attempting to make it in America.

This might be probably the most extreme film on the list. During its theatrical run, I saw it multiple times, mainly to count the walkouts on rewatch (of which there have been many). So in the event you’re some form of completionist trying to examine all of the boxes, consider yourself thoroughly warned.

Within the early 2000s, Antonio Inoki got a crazy idea to begin having pro wrestlers face real MMA fighters. The outcomes were disastrous. Some wrestlers were hurt, others were simply humiliated. Yuji Nagata’s profession took years to recuperate. CM Punk’s UFC profession was an fast joke. Brock Lesnar has had some success within the octagon, nevertheless it’s hard to essentially say he made the impact on MMA that he made on pro wrestling. Jake Hager has seemingly bought his own hype so hard that he’s bombed out of the wrestling world and can now be a fight geek within the PowerSlap promotion.

Ultimately, Pro Wrestling is a gimmick. These aren’t the best combat fighters on the planet, regardless of how much the Bloodsport shows attempt to sell you on it. These are performers who sometimes forget that they’re performers.

Such is the case with Stan Carlisle in “Nightmare Alley,” which was first a book, then a 1947 film starring Tyrone Power, after which a 2021 film starring Bradley Cooper. It is a potent fable in regards to the dangers of believing your gimmick a bit of too hard.

You see, wrestling is a carnival, and there is just one a part of the carnival that is real: The Geek. In the event you begin to consider in your personal gimmick too hard, you will find yourself playing The Geek in a method or one other, debasing yourself to make people feel higher about themselves. You is likely to be a quick talker. You is likely to be playing the cushiest gigs on this planet. But everyone within the carnival is one unsuitable turn from biting the pinnacle off a chicken or getting slapped in the pinnacle for a living.

Wrestlers are larger-than-life cartoons who strap on sequins and spandex for our entertainment, but also they are real human beings, caught in the identical form of grind as any job, just one which requires rather more physical pain. Most biopics either pick the parable or the person, but Baz Luhrmann’s 2022, “Elvis” strikes a balance between the 2, to indicate how the 2 identities worked in tandem, and likewise destroyed the body that needed to contain them each, told by the carny huckster who drove the icon into the bottom within the name of profit.

Hulk Hogan, The Rock, John Cena, you’ll be able to probably slot any most important eventer into the titular role, and you would not should change much. Okay, you’d have to exchange the songs with grappling, but you get it. I’m sure Elvis bragged about performing twice on Sunday, like most wrestlers from the business’s golden age.

I’m sure there are some individuals who consider Ric Flair saw “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and decided to enter to Richard Strauss for the remaining of his life, nevertheless it’s rather more likely that the sequined “Nature Boy” stole his schtick from Elvis Presley, and who can blame him? There isn’t a franchise face within the wrestling business who doesn’t have a bit of little bit of “The King” in them.

Some wrestlers like to think about themselves as warriors. A few of them like to think about themselves as clowns. Some consider themselves as MCU heroes, or villains, in some cases. Irrespective of what delusions wrestlers might hold about themselves, they’re all Marty Mauser.

The protagonist of the Best Picture-nominated “Marty Supreme” is laser-focused on his own dreams, with enough ambition to hold him across oceans, and a steadfast willingness to say anything within the hopes of maintaining the delusion that he’s the Great Man he believes himself to be.

There’s nothing more indicative of “Marty Supreme’s” relationship to wrestling, than watching roughly an hour-and-a-half of a most important character –who lies, cheats, steals, and screws over anyone he has to– tell a sponsor, “I’m gonna do some bad things on the stage, but that is just my character. I’m just playing a personality,” with absolutely no self-awareness about all the opposite bad things he’s done off-stage.

Irrespective of what number of wrestlers describe the job as just that, a job, there shouldn’t be a single one that has made it on this business without being something of a ruthless dreamer. It could be easy if people in real life fell into the clean black-and-white lines of kayfabe. Onstage, someone like Marty Mauser is a villain, but in the actual world, he’s only a hustler, like anyone, doing what he has to do to get to the subsequent game, or to Japan, or simply to get home.

This has been a reasonably grim and dour read, if I’m being completely honest. It may well be easy to forget that, at the top of the day, wrestling –like movies– is for the dreamers. You possibly can get jaded and cynical, but sometimes the fitting combination of earnestness, sincerity, and fervour will remind you exactly why you began watching this ridiculous thing in the primary place.

Wrestling is so much like a Neil Diamond tribute band. You would possibly hate “Sweet Caroline” deep in your bones, and think that the lead singer looks ridiculous attempting to conjure the ghost of a person who continues to be alive, but you’ll be able to’t deny the artistry or the fervour.

Yes, “Song Sung Blue” is a form of ridiculous, manipulative movie, but damned if it doesn’t scratch that very same corny, high-fructose itch that good wrestling often does. Carny dreamers in ridiculous outfits, fighting backstage over time and gimmicks. 

If Marty Mauser is who most wrestlers are behind the scenes, Lightning & Thunder are what every wrestler aspires to be when the lights are on: Someone who could make even an ardent Neil Diamond hater like me sing along to “Soolaimon.”