How ‘Suburban Commando’ Ruined Hulk Hogan’s Movie Career

Hulk Hogan made his feature-starring debut in the 1989 action film No Holds Barred, which was a disaster with both critics and audiences. Following No Holds Barred, the creative process continued to fail Hogan with his next feature-starring vehicle, the 1991 science-fiction comedy film Suburban Commando, in which Hogan plays Shep Ramsey, an extraterrestrial warrior whose spaceship crash-lands on planet Earth, where he befriends a quirky suburban family.

While the kid-oriented Suburban Commando is a welcome departure from the blood-soaked No Holds Barred, the film’s sheer innocuousness made it unappealing to the shifting tastes of Hogan’s wrestling fandom in 1991. The failure of Suburban Commando, which grossed less than $7 million at the domestic box office, destroyed Hogan’s box-office credibility and effectively ended his bid for major Hollywood stardom. This is a real shame, because with his bronze physique, inherent likability, silky bleach-blond hair, and virtually incomparable charisma, Hogan, who died on July 24, 2025, at the age of 71, was a cultural icon who could have achieved feature-film stardom with the right material.

Nearly 35 years after its initial release, the most enduring legacy of Suburban Commando, and the overall botched experiment in translating Hogan’s wrestling stardom to the big screen, is how this period became a cautionary example for later wrestling superstars Dwayne Johnson and John Cena, who have achieved great success in Hollywood by precisely avoiding the disastrous mistakes that were made with Hogan.

‘Suburban Commando’ Is Better Than ‘No Holds Barred’ (Which Isn’t Saying Much)

The launching of Hulk Hogan’s big-screen career was engineered by his longtime wrestling promoter, Vince McMahon, who proved to be completely inept at translating Hogan’s rampant wrestling popularity to the big screen. Instead of showcasing his undeniable qualities as a performer, Hogan’s first feature-starring vehicle, No Holds Barred, degrades his image through its sheer predictability and unbridled vulgarity. With No Holds Barred, McMahon couldn’t have devised a worse starring vehicle for his top draw, even if his goal had been to sabotage Hogan’s career and waste the reported $8 million invested in the film.

With Hogan’s next feature starring vehicle, Suburban Commando, for which McMahon was only attached in an advisory capacity, a conscious attempt was made to incorporate the campy charm of the 1980s wrestling product to attract the young audience that was repelled by the utter grossness of No Holds Barred. Suburban Commando opens as a jokey Star Wars rip-off, with Hogan’s larger-than-life action hero character, interstellar warrior Shep Ramsey, attempting to capture an egomaniacal and obnoxious intergalactic despot named General Suitor. After the mission ends poorly, Shep is ordered to take a vacation, and he angrily smashes his ship’s control systems, thus forcing him to crash-land on Earth.

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After arriving on Earth, Suburban Commando becomes a fish-out-of-water comedy, as Shep houses his damaged ship at the residence of a harried architect, played by Christopher Lloyd, and his wife, played by the wonderful Shelley Duvall. As Shep forms an emotional attachment with his family, his whereabouts are tracked by Suitor, who sends a pair of intergalactic bounty hunters to Earth to destroy Shep. However, while the relatively family-friendly Suburban Commando represents a welcome change of pace from the grimy and sadistic No Holds Barred, the film’s deliberately hokey special effects and sitcom-like situations contribute to an overall lack of compelling interest, making the film an entirely dispensable and forgettable viewing experience.

Hulk Hogan Is Too Lightweight in ‘Suburban Commando’

Hulk Hogan made his memorable feature-film debut opposite Sylvester Stallone in the third installment in the Rocky franchise, Rocky III, in which Hogan plays Thunderlips, a flamboyant wrestling champion who pretends to fight Rocky in an exhibition charity match. However, while Stallone provided an effective example for Hogan to follow in terms of establishing his own successful big-screen persona as an action daredevil, a better model for him was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who gained superstardom in the late 1980s by blending action and comedy, as Hogan attempted to do with Suburban Commando.

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Indeed, Schwarzenegger was originally attached to star in Suburban Commando, which was a hot project in Hollywood, ostensibly because it provided a seemingly foolproof vehicle for an established action star like Schwarzenegger to demonstrate their innate ability to inhabit a vast landscape, in this case an entire galaxy, primarily through the force of their magnetic personality and oversized presence. This proves to be Hogan’s failure in Suburban Commando, as while he dwarfs Schwarzenegger and Stallone on a purely physical level, he fails to command the screen the way his size might suggest. In a deliberately silly role that mostly calls for him to intimidate the rest of the cast with his imposing presence, Hogan instead looks and seems relatively ordinary, like a friendly neighborhood space vigilante.

Dwayne Johnson and John Cena Couldn’t Have Survived ‘Suburban Commando’

While the business of professional wrestling, or sports entertainment, has significantly expanded over the past 40 years, no performer has achieved greater popularity within a given era than Hulk Hogan did in the 1980s. He didn’t fail to achieve major film stardom as much as the lackluster feature-film vehicles that he was given, with No Holds Barred and Suburban Commando, failed him. This disconnect is especially evident in comparison with how later wrestling superstars, such as John Cena and Dwayne Johnson, achieved film fame through a creative process that’s infinitely more adept at grooming wrestlers for movie stardom now than it was for Hogan in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Indeed, as Cena and Johnson’s acting careers have been greatly helped by an enhanced creative process and quality control principles that didn’t exist for Hogan in his prime, there will always be a fascination in imagining how a younger Hogan might have thrived in today’s environment with a much stronger support system, just as it’s interesting to speculate how Cena and Johnson would have fared if they’d been forced to carry low-quality starring vehicles like No Holds Barred and Suburban Commando. Suburban Commando is streaming on Tubi.