Logo text

Netflix‘s Hulk Hogan: Real American, Bryan Storkel’s four-part tribute to the late wrestling legend, is not a documentary for people who especially care about “good” documentaries.

It’s a documentary for people who care about Hulk Hogan — but only truly care in-depth about the admirable parts of Hulk Hogan’s mythic life and will surely be happier with a mediocre documentary that accentuates those parts, rather than a good documentary that offers substance or depth.

And Hulk Hogan: Real American is absolutely that mediocre documentary, so enjoy!

Put a different way, here are three key data points regarding Hulk Hogan: Real American: Firstly, the title is wholly in earnest and not an interrogation of what it means to be Hulk Hogan and what it means to be a “real American,” for better or worse. Secondly, the documentary is produced “in association” with WWE Entertainment, which has a lucrative partnership with Netflix. Thirdly, the president of the United States appears in the documentary — a low-energy appearance that would have caused a director with journalistic instincts to ponder, “If I interview the president of the United States and he’s a dismal interview subject, is it okay to cut the president of the United States?” Instead, he’s here amply and substance-free.

The truth is that I’m probably the only Netflix subscriber to watch Hulk Hogan: Real American primarily because of Storkel’s name. The director, and wife Amy, worked together on the entertainingly silly The Pez Outlaw and the recent SXSW premiere I Got Bombed at Harvey’s, two docs that chronicled eccentric, larger-than-life characters with distinctive style and admirable empathy.

Hulk Hogan: Real American has no appreciable style to speak of and, instead of empathy, it has admiration; those aren’t the same things — at least not if you’re attempting to create a nuanced portrait of a complicated life. The fourth episode of Hulk Hogan: Real American even trots out Werner Herzog to give a thesis statement for a far better documentary that I wish Herzog had made.

“In the life of Hulk Hogan, what is reality? What is the real truth? Strangely enough, emotions are always truthful no matter how crazy and implausible the story might be. And searching for truth gives us dignity, gives us meaning,” Herzog says, in exactly the way you’d expect him to say it.

The suggestion here — and in the Netflix logline for the series that begins “Before he was Hulk Hogan, he was Terry Bollea” — is that Hulk Hogan: Real American is going to dig deeply into performativity, American celebrity and the cult of professional wrestling. Instead, Hulk Hogan: Real American mostly talks about Hulk Hogan, not the human being beneath the bandanas (Terry likes bandanas, too) and yellow tights, and leaves us with the understanding that Terry Bollea was basically Hulk Hogan with the volume turned down by 15 to 20 percent. As revelations within searches for the truth go, it’s anticlimactic.

Hulk Hogan: Real American does just fine with the easy parts of Hulk Hogan’s life and celebrity — the unprecedented rise and extended plateau, during which he was one of the most recognizable and possibly one of the most beloved men in all of popular culture.

Boasting large quantities of home movie footage and early wrestling materials, plus exhaustive access to Hogan, including the last interviews he conducted before his death in July 2025, the doc charts his journey from oversized Florida bass musician Terry Bollea to early wrestling personae including The Super Destroyer, Terry Boulder and The Incredible Hulk Hogan. (No mention is made of the legal agreement between Hogan and Marvel regarding use and presentation of the Hulk name, a footnote I’ve always found very amusing.)

I’m an ’80s boy who watched an ample amount of wrestling from that period, as well as his Saturday morning animated series Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling and his various media-saturating commercials and cameos, so I have no trouble stirring up nostalgia for The Hulkster and the rise of Hulkamania. An awful lot of the biggest names in Hogan’s sphere passed away relatively young, and it’s hard not to miss Andre the Giant and Randy Savage and Roddy Piper, among others.

A lot of Hogan’s peers make appearances, from Jesse Ventura, on his best behavior to an unconvincing degree, to Jimmy Hart and Bret Hart and Ted Dibiase, while several more contemporaries feature in an extended “People find out Hulk Hogan died and nod sadly” montage in the finale. But for all the respect people hold him in, very few of those contemporaries are all that candid or voluble about Hogan.

Linda, Hogan’s first wife, is an excitable and constant presence, as is son Nick, but daughter Brooke is nowhere to be seen. It’s one thing for the documentary to say that it wants to introduce us to Terry Bollea as a contrast to Hulk Hogan, but there are very few people here who actually know/knew Terry Bollea — and for most of its first three hours, the doc just conflates the two without qualification.

A bigger absence is anybody with the last name “McMahon,” particularly Vince. Brooke Hogan and Vince McMahon are heard in unattributed audio, exactly enough so that people who don’t pay attention will be under the impression that they participated in the documentary, even if they definitely did not. A variety of WWE figures, including Bruce Prichard and Paul “Triple H” Levesque, are on hand to talk about Hulk’s importance to the company and the brand. Levesque even gets to discuss the decision to fire Hulk in the aftermath of various mid-’10s controversies, but when he claims that he fired Terry Bollea and not Hulk Hogan, it comes across as a distinction without a difference.

At some point, it becomes remarkable how tentative the documentary is when it comes to anything genuinely problematic or troubling in Hogan’s life and image. His protracted legal tussle with Richard Belzer over an incident/assault on Belzer’s Hot Properties? Mentioned and acknowledged, but I’m not sure you’d understand why it’s notable. His testimony in Vince McMahon’s 1994 drug trial? Presented mostly as evidence of Hogan’s heroism and, owing to McMahon’s absence, raced through in a way likely to confuse anybody looking for a meaningful takeaway. A 1996 sexual assault accusation and counter-suit for extortion? Definitely not included.

Those are biographical details that would come before the formal “downfall” segment of the documentary, which is the bulk of the disjointed, heavily glossed-over 78-minute finale. That episode races through the Gawker suit in a superficial and one-sided way that features no voices from the Gawker side and never mentions the name “Peter Thiel.” The documentary has no choice but to acknowledge the “racial slurs” angle of the sex tape story, though if you’re unsure what the “slurs” actually were, nobody says and the audio isn’t played. Hulk has an entire, 10-year second marriage that the documentary mostly pretends didn’t exist, while the affair that contributed to the end of his marriage to Linda is treated as a regretful one-off, talked about less than Linda’s own retaliatory affair.

Anything dark in Hogan/Bollea’s life was cured by his third wife — as well as finding Jesus and finding Donald Trump. Those two events are treated as parallel, though the latter is more triumphant than the former; Donald Trump is a mumbling talking head here and Jesus is not.

Hogan’s death, which took everybody — including the filmmakers — by surprise, is acknowledged as at least somewhat a product of the professional wrestling lifestyle, but it also imposes a finality and a reverential tone that does the documentary no favors.

There’s something poignant about all the footage of an aging Hogan being propped up by younger wrestlers in the ring, but being unable to get out of the spotlight due to financial need and contractual obligations. There’s a version of this documentary that could take a serious look at the toll of wrestling on Hogan and his prematurely aged and deceased colleagues. Maybe that documentary would have pondered the exploitation of these men (and a couple of women) over decades and how that might not have happened if professional wrestlers had successfully unionized in the ’80s. But that would have required Hulk Hogan: Real American to admit that one of the wrestlers who allegedly opposed that unionization effort was Hulk Hogan.

There’s a smart and pragmatic documentary about Hulk Hogan, professional wrestling and the shaping of fin de siècle American identity (and the rise of Hulk’s buddy in the White House). Instead, we get this gap-filled piece of memorializing, corporate-backed hagiography. The Hulk Hogan: Real American target audience probably is happier this way.