Plans for the reported Netflix Hulk Hogan biopic starring Chris Hemsworth have been canceled, according to Todd Phillips, who was pegged as the film's director.
“I love what we were trying to do, but that’s not going to come together for me,” Phillips told Variety while discussing his upcoming film Joker: Folie à Deux.
Hogan also confirmed that the biopic was scrapped during an interview with Chris Van Vliet on Wednesday (August 21).
“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 added. 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.”
Hemsworth had previously acknowledged that he wasn't sure if the Hogan biopic was still happening in 2022 as Phillips had plans for several other films and later dodged a question about whether he was still attached to the role, claiming that the movie hadn't been given a "green light" via ScreenRant.com. Another film centered around Hogan's lawsuit with Gawker media entitled Killing Gawker is reported to be in development with Ben Affleck in talks to play Hogan and Matt Damon potentially playing billionaire Peter Thiel, who financed the WWE Hall of Famer's lawsuit against the gossip website.