Sorry, brother: You're not getting Todd Phillips' Hulk Hogan movie

Bad news for anyone who was desperate to see Chris Hemsworth tear off a paper-thin tank top, or work out his standing emotional issues with the members of the Wrestling Boot Band: Todd Phillips’ previously announced Hulk Hogan biopic is officially no longer in the works. After five years of “Still in the works, probably!” optimism, the Joker director bodyslammed the film into non-existence earlier this week, in a much longer interview about the production of his new “We’re not calling it a musical” musical, Joker: Folie à Deux.

“I love what we were trying to do,” Phillips said of the movie, which was originally discussed back in 2019, around the time the first Joker was becoming an improbably huge box office hit. But in the years that have followed, the project seems to have persistently refused to solidify, with first Netflix seeming to back away, and then Hemsworth making it clear that he’d never formally signed on for the project. Phillips himself doesn’t go into detail on the project in his recent comments, simply stating that, “That’s not going to come together for me.” Which is wild to consider, given just how much heft Phillips had in Hollywood right after Joker came out, but apparently there’s no amount of box office juice capable of getting an official biopic of a controversial figure like Hogan off the ground.

Of course, someone‘s going to play the guy in a Hollywood movie at some point; it was just a couple of weeks ago that we were idly entertaining rumors that Ben Affleck might give what we’re sure would be a very nuanced portrayal of the professional-wrestler-turned-professional-plaintiff in the Killing Gawker movie that he and Matt Damon are supposedly circling at the moment. Hogan remains a larger-than-life figure, even if that’s mostly carried the caveat “in a bad way” over the last two decades; there’s room here for someone to turn that into an interesting film performance, even if it won’t be Hemsworth.