As you could notice the movie screens have been dominated by wrestlers this past month with Dwayne Johnson coming in hot in The Fate of the Furious and Baywatch which is coming in 10 days or so. He is not the only one since there is his college Dave Bautista, who’s in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. The wrestling world is easily conquering the Hollywood, and as it looks so far, it’s actually not a bad thing.
As you know out of the bunch of wrestlers turned actors Dwayne is the biggest contributor who is as successful on the big screen as he was in the ring, if not even more. By some reviews and overviews, Bautista is right behind Dwayne with his role as the emotional heart of a slice of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, plus he also landed a role in the new Blade Runner, and this means that WWE could have very easily produced another movie superstar.
What is important to say is that even Johnson and Bautista are doing pretty well so far, it is very hard to build a successful acting career even if you have a WWE background as a boost. Besides these two many former and current wrestlers “contributed” to the movie scene but they somehow didn’t manage to achieve the same greatness as Johnson and Bautista did.
Yes it is true that WWE loves when one of their guys makes it to the big screen, and it is showed by the organization’s internal film studio or the acting lessons it gives to talent that gets film work, but they have one, well it is a, huge problem – many wrestlers get invited to Hollywood only to be typecast as strongmen and muscle. If you go to IMDb you can see that out of around 1.000 wrestlers turned actors roughly half has an IMDb link and out of that half only 50 of them have notable feature film jobs, and yes they were in roles of bad guys, goons, and muscle.
If you continue to fiddle with numbers and names, you get around 20 wrestlers that actually have substantial credits in feature films that were reviewed by critics or made it to theaters. The one guy that picks all of the credits is, of course, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, the guy who could be praised for days but what is notable is that Bautista came really close to him. In the picture below you will see some of the busiest and best-known wrestlers with info regarding their onscreen success.
