10 Movies About Wrestling We Actually Want To See

As one of the most popular and innovative wrestlers in the world, let alone Japan, Antonio Inoki’s story is worth telling. Despite only making rare, one-off appearances for WCW and WWE, he has been inducted into both company’s Halls of Fame, in addition to that of NJPW, where he spent most of career.

Inoki’s accomplishments don’t stop there thought. He has also fought Muhammad Ali in a precursor MMA match, wrestled in front of over 150,000 people in North Korea, has started his own wrestling company, and even formed a splinter political party in Japan, following more than twenty years as a politician.

Remarkably, none of these fascinating facts have been documented on screen, and Inoki’s standing as an enigmatic pioneer within both politics and combat sports is still fairly unknown among western audiences. But Inoki is a dream subject for any documentarian, the kind of person whose life reads off like a string of unbelievable trivia. His match against Ali alone would make for exciting cinematic adaptation, especially since – regardless of the quality of the match – it helped to popularise mixed martial arts as we know it today.