The Story of ‘No Holds Barred,’ Vince McMahon, and the Quest for a Great WWE Movie
Netflix’s ‘Mr. McMahon’ docuseries tells the story of when Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan made a terrible wrestling film, 1989’s ‘No Holds Barred.’ Thirty-five years later, WWE has realized it can make better cinema by sticking to what it knows.
On a recent episode of SmackDown, WWE aired a nine-minute video package featuring storied foes Roman Reigns and Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes meeting face-to-face on the Georgia Tech football field. A plethora of drone shots featured all types of sleek vehicles making their way to the meet in Atlanta, soundtracked by a Vo Williams and Titus O’Neil song about the long-standing animosity between Reigns and Rhodes.
From Robert Griffin III to The Ringer’s own Masked Man Show, the early reviews are in: WWE can churn out captivating cinema when it wants to. Whether it’s the Bloodline saga that Reigns kicked off in 2020, the Undertaker’s Boneyard Match with AJ Styles, or CM Punk and Drew McIntyre’s 2024 feud, WWE has shown that it can create more captivating and detailed stories by taking its normal plotlines and making them feel larger than life with the use of Hollywood-level technology and more detailed narratives.
It feels like a simple process, right? The world of pro wrestling sports entertainment is built on predetermined stories that speak to the simplest form of narrative: good versus evil. There are a myriad of ways to tell those stories, but WWE has figured out how to do this kind of cinema (for lack of a better term) well only over the past few years. Maybe WWE had to crawl before it could walk; that learning process has taken about 35 years. In 1989, Vince McMahon—as detailed in the new Netflix docuseries Mr. McMahon, produced by Ringer Films—was looking to make sure his company kept earning money by allowing Hulk Hogan, his top star, to pursue his Hollywood career in-house. The result was the epically awful No Holds Barred, which Hogan says he wrote with McMahon over two days in a hotel room. And, spoiler alert: It shows.
McMahon’s attempts to satiate Hogan’s Hollywood dreams were understandable. On his journey to pro wrestling dominance, McMahon tried everything to get his company, then known as the World Wrestling Federation, into the spotlight. Pro wrestling is built on theatrics, but McMahon’s aim was to make that spectacle palatable for mainstream audiences. He’d soon find success with Cyndi Lauper and the Rock ’n’ Wrestling craze in the early ’80s, compilation albums featuring smash hits like “Grab Them Cakes” and “Jive Soul Bro,” and the 1986 and 1987 Slammy Awards. But the wrestling theatrics of the ’80s also birthed Rocky III, which led to Hogan’s first departure from McMahon territory.
Hogan, who at the time was working for the WWF under Vince’s father, Vince McMahon Sr., says that Sylvester Stallone approached him about the third Rocky movie after seeing him wrestle two competitors at the same time. As Hogan says in Mr. McMahon, when he approached Vince Sr. about it, the response was, “You’re not doing that,” primarily because he didn’t see wrestlers as actors. He told Hogan that he’d be fired if he did Rocky III, which was exactly what happened when Hogan left to be a part of the film. But Hogan knew it would put him on the map. He played Thunderlips, a pro wrestling champion who fought Rocky Balboa in an exhibition match, famously hurling Balboa into the crowd before the chairs started flying.
By the time Rocky III hit theaters in May 1982, Hogan was already back in Verne Gagne’s AWA, perfecting his gimmick (from ripping off his T-shirt to his signature Legdrop). But it wasn’t long before Hogan returned to the WWF in December 1983. McMahon Jr. didn’t want to start his push for worldwide wrestling dominance with world champion Bob Backlund. So he had the Iron Sheik defeat Backlund for the WWF Championship on December 26, 1983; Hogan then beat the Iron Sheik for the title on January 23, 1984. That win ushered in the beginning of Hulkamania, which itself led to the great wrestling boom of the 1980s. Hogan went from being the face of the WWF to being the face of pro wrestling for an entire generation.
But the threat that Hogan would leave wrestling for Hollywood continued to loom. McMahon speaks about his fear of losing Hogan in Mr. McMahon, saying that “because of the success that we had, Hogan wanted to be a part of Hollywood. And I’m going … ‘I’m going to lose Hogan to Hollywood now.’ And I said, ‘Terry [Bollea, Hulk Hogan’s real name], you’re going to do a film. I’ll do one with you.’ I knew nothing about filmmaking. So Terry and I decided, ‘Well, all right, we’ll go write a movie.’” That movie eventually became the first theatrical release from the WWF, 1989’s No Holds Barred, which was part Steven Seagal, part The Incredible Hulk, and all bad.
Hogan explains that he and McMahon spent “two, two and a half days in a hotel room writing the whole script. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We were just having fun.” In their wrestling sports entertainment opus, Hogan plays Rip, a WWF champion who’s so hot that the head of the World Television Network, Tom Brell, makes it his mission to woo him to his … network? Rip has a meeting with Brell early on in the film, but it ends badly, and Brell sends a gaggle of goons to kidnap Rip during his limo ride home. Rip kicks dents into the side of the door, sending the car onto the sidewalk, and eventually bursts from the roof of the limo and makes a guy crap his pants—all for a bad “dookie” joke. (Note: This script is credited to Dennis Hackin, but as a lifelong fan of pro wrestling, I know a McMahon poop joke when I hear one.)
At the time, young WWF fans were ecstatic. The Hogan MO in that era was the yellow-and-red hero fighting dastardly villains who felt like the monsters you’d hide from when it got dark. Hogan had been on top of the federation for years, and while he’d traded in his trademark red-and-yellow colors for Rip’s blue-and-white gear, No Holds Barred brought his energy into real-life scenarios.
Except … it was weird. What did Rip do to blow the roof off the limo before making the driver say “dookie”? How much did they spend on those “special effects”? Was Brell supposed to be a caricature of Ted Turner, the billionaire who went head-to-head with McMahon for years because Turner owned World Championship Wrestling? And if so, has anyone brought up the irony that McMahon and Hogan wrote a film in which Hogan’s character was wooed by a rich TV businessman, which basically happened roughly five years after this film’s release? The one question that McMahon and Co. did answer was “What happens after you release a pro wrestling movie?” The answer is that you turn it into part of the pro wrestling show.
McMahon decided to make the film’s (other) villain, Zeus (played by Tommy “Tiny” Lister) a character on WWF television. From what Hogan told Arsenio Hall, he and the Zeus character had some friction on the set of No Holds Barred that spilled into the wrestling ring. Aside from appearances in promo segments on weekend WWF TV, Zeus’s time in the WWF can be boiled down to a few face-offs against Hogan at SummerSlam, Survivor Series, and the No Holds Barred: The Match/The Movie pay-per-view.
In a 2018 interview with Hannibal TV, Lister says that his deal was initially just for the movie. “He used the matches to promote the movie,” Lister says. He also says that McMahon spent $10 million on the film (although Lister somehow thought it made “a hundred million dollars”). Hogan put the estimated production budget at closer to “seven or eight million” in his memoir. The film, which debuted in second place behind Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, ended up breaking even. Some estimates say it made around $16 million—not as much as the WWF expected for Hogan’s star vehicle.
On an October 1997 episode of Raw (at a time when Hogan was a part of WCW, WWE’s main rival), a conversation about old matches led commentator Jim Ross to ask McMahon how much money he’d lost on No Holds Barred. McMahon quips that Hogan said he’d send him a check if the film lost money: “I’m still waiting for that check,” Vince says.
The subsequent rereleases of No Holds Barred may bear the WWE Studios logo, but that brand didn’t become a thing until 2002, with the launch of WWE Films, which would allow McMahon’s WWE talent to act in movies while he still ate off their work. These films didn’t make much of a splash: 2006’s John Cena–led The Marine—which somehow spawned five sequels—brought in $22.2 million on a $15 million budget, and Kane’s 2006 horror flick, See No Evil, made $18.7 million on an $8 million budget. The 2007 “Stone Cold” Steve Austin vehicle The Condemned made $8.6 million on a $20 million budget. The results from WWE Studios’ other ventures would continue to vary over the years. (Triple H didn’t even make $300,000 at the box office for 2011’s The Chaperone.) In 2010, then–WWE executive vice president Andrew Whitaker called WWE Studios “a broadening and a natural extension of the entertainment business we’re already in,” but when you step back and look at its theatrical releases over the past two decades, there was a lot of effort wasted (and money spent) trying to make WWE Films a legit studio.
In his review of No Holds Barred, Gene Siskel acknowledged what would plague WWE’s 35 years of filmmaking attempts, even if he didn’t know it yet: “The film is utterly lacking in the campy quality of the World Wrestling Federation telecasts.” In an effort to become a Hollywood screenwriter and producer, McMahon forgot what he was ultimately good at: making pro wrestling television. Instead of trying to stop his world champion from leaving his promotion by making an awful film that a wider (read: non-wrestling) audience wasn’t even interested in seeing, McMahon could have brought that knack for innovation to his main product, enhancing the visuals and making his programming stand out in a world where Turner was waiting in the wings to eat all of McMahon’s food.
And ultimately, all of this was for naught. Hogan never became a movie star; honestly, the film hit toward the back end of his massive Hulkamania run—and judging by that Arsenio Hall Show crowd, the reception for Hogan among non-wrestling fans was kinda quiet. And after WWE Studios’ many attempts at success, what the WWE universe remembers is the cinematics of WWE’s weekly programming. Kane fans may love seeing the Big Red Machine in a horror film, but they want to see him bring the horror in the squared circle on Raw or SmackDown. A drone hovering over Reigns and Rhodes on that Georgia Tech field oozes more cinematic cool than any shot of Hogan in No Holds Barred surrounded by a group of kids, looking up at a helicopter making its descent, or winning matches with a goddamn ax handle.
