Hollywood Climbing Into Pro Wrestling Ring

Four years ago, Hollywood rediscovered the Western. Last year, disaster movies were the rage, and this year, World War II movies are all over the screen. Next year, moviegoers might be grappling with wrestling.

Strange as it sounds, Hollywood execs are turning to wrestlers for a whole host of projects: Mandalay Pictures is exploring development of a wrestling film; 20th Century Fox has an idea for which it is about to hire a writer; Outlaw Prods. has tapped Steven Brill — screenwriter of the “Mighty Ducks” franchise — to script a wrestling movie; and Barry Blaustein is directing “Beyond the Mat,” a documentary about professional wrestling for Imagine Entertainment.

The turnaround comes at an unusual time, given that seemingly similar boxing movies — a Hollywood staple that has spawned classics from “Body and Soul” to “Requiem for a Heavyweight” to “Rocky” to “Raging Bull” — are out cold. But, as so often, there are sound economic reasons why Hollywood thinks wrestling is in.

The popularity of the sport is at an all-time high: Last television season, six of the top seven primetime original series on cable were professional wrestling programs. The matches draw 35 million mostly young male viewers each week. That’s the same target audience that delighted in seeing Paul “The Giant” Wight interact with Adam Sandler in “The Waterboy,” helping propel the film to its $146 million gross.

Though wrestling has been around for decades, Barry Bloom, whose company represents professional champion Bill Goldberg and others from World Championship Wrestling, pinpoints its resurgence to the time when “wrestling came out of the closet as a staged event.”

“Instead of spending energy trying to figure out if it’s real or fake, people accepted it as a legitimate form of entertainment and became more interested in the execution,” he said. “They were finally able to get deeply involved in the characters and story lines and found themselves enmeshed in a sort of athletic soap opera.”

The wrestling momentum reached a crescendo when two cable shows went head to head: Turner-owned WCW’s “Monday Nitro” on TNT vs. World Wrestling Federation’s “Raw Is War” on USA. A ratings war began as both wrestling organizations aimed to outdo each other by featuring more outrageous characters, story lines and pyrotechnic production values. The result tripled WWF’s and WCW’s combined audience and shrank that of ABC’s “Monday Night Football.”

“We’re a dominating factor on television and Hollywood is finally recognizing wrestling as a form of entertainment - not fake sports - and that there are opportunities here,” WCW president Eric Bischoff. “Today, not a day goes by that I don’t get two or three phone calls from Hollywood producers or receive two to three scripts across my desk.”

Warner Bros.-based Outlaw Prods. (“sex, lies & videotape,” “Three to Tango”) is working with Bischoff on a wrestling comedy and has tapped Brill to write it.

“With our deal at Warner Bros. and the WCW having a Time Warner affiliation (with its TNT home), we’re in a unique position to create a great wrestling movie,” Outlaw president of production Scott Strauss said.

But Outlaw Prods. isn’t the only company in which WCW is in business. “We’re talking to (Mandalay Pictures’) Peter Guber on two features that we’re planning on doing,” Bischoff said. “Not straight-to-video B movies, but large-scale, substantial films with substantial budgets.”

Bischoff is already working closely with Jason Hervey and David Salzberg, the principals of Mandalay Sports Video Productions, to create original home video programing for WCW. The five-month-old company is also developing a wrestling action feature for TNT starring WCW star Sting.

The WWF has enlisted the help of the William Morris Agency to represent it.

“Our mission is to expand and diversify the WWF business and to move it into features, TV movies, miniseries, animated series and comic books,” said Mark Itkin, senior vice president and head of television syndication packaging at WMA. “Feature film-wise, there are three major scripts that we’re looking at right now.”

Independent producer Michael Meltzer (“Wes Craven’s Carnival of Souls”) is prepping “Crunch … The Wrestling Movie” for production in early 1999. Written by Thomas Chapman and David O’Malley, who will also direct, “Crunch” stars Extreme Championship Wrestling’s Rob Van Dam as a laid-off auto factory worker who becomes an unexpected hero when he defeats a hated wrestling villain, WCW’s Raven, in a bar brawl and the two become rivals.

Goldberg has joined the cast of sci-fi action adventure “Universal Soldier II,” playing an indestructible soldier and adversary to Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Devereaux character from the original 1992 Columbia movie.

“Casting a wrestler adds star power to a project,” manager Bloom said. “It’s the same mentality as casting a star from a hit TV show to be in your film.”

But, as so often happens, there could be a down side for Hollywood. Competing films on the same subject often cancel each other out at the box office, and few television stars have gone on to deliver a significant movie audience. Witness Jerry Springer (whose TV audience is precisely that which many wrestling movie producers wish to capture): His feature, “Ringmaster,” has taken in only $8.5 million (though the picture cost only about $3 million).

Still, most wrestling movies in the works are trying to expand their audience, adding to die-hard fans by casting wrestlers in unusual ways.

“Our aim is to take the wrestling genre and put it in a different environment,” Itkin said. “It’s a fish out of water idea - taking a wrestler and pairing him opposite another talent from a different genre and creating a buddy comedy, for example.”

If that works, wrestling may become the next Hollywood gold mine. Until it’s proved otherwise, showbiz will continue to chase after it.

“Wrestling is on a popularity surge and Hollywood chases the popular,” said Craig Baumgarten, a producer on “Universal Soldier II.” “This is the greatest `me-too’ town in the world, so if wrestling stays hot, Hollywood will keep going after it.”