Wrestling MovesThe latest from WWE Films.by Brian Linder
January 18, 2005 - Prolific wrestling businessman Vince McMahon is formally launching WWE Films, a branch of his World Wrestling Entertainment empire that will produce and finance genre movie projects featuring WWE personalities. Industry insider mag Variety tips that most of the projects will be budgeted at under $20 million.
One new project, The Condemned, will feature Stone Cold Steve Austin in his big-screen acting debut. The film will center around an ex-cop (Austin), who was framed and landed on death row. He's offered a pardon, but only if he chooses to compete in a fight-to-the-death reality show. Austin has reportedly signed a three-picture deal. Another film in the works, The Marine, will star John "Doctor of Thuganomics" Cena as an injured Marine who returns from combat to find that his wife (Kelly Carlson of Nip/Tuck) is being held hostage by a diamond thief. The Marine must race against the clock to save her and, no doubt, beat the crap out of everybody in the process.
Lions Gate is also developing Goodnight, a horror film for wrestler Kane, in conjunction with WWE Films. Details are sketchy but the picture is billed as "a very intense, very violent horror movie in which a great deal of the horror comes out of the film's unique setting." Kane's character is called "remorseless, relentless, vicious and a sadistic monster cut from the same cloth as such horror franchise icons as Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees." Nice!
There's also been a rumored Western for superstar Triple H. The film, Jornada del Muerte (Journey of Death), was to be written and directed by John Milius (Conan the Barbarian, Apocalypse Now), but the project's current status is unknown
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