Things You Didn't Know About Ready To Rumble After 25 Years

April 7, 2000. A day that will always stand out in the history of professional wrestling. Mitsuharu Misawa advanced to the semi-finals of All Japan Pro Wrestling's Champion Carnival tournament by defeating Vader. New Japan Pro Wrestling put 60,000 people in the Tokyo Dome for their "Dome Impact" event, and Los Laguneros successfully defended their CMLL World Trios Championships in Arena Mexico. However, all of that pales in comparison to what happened in the United States on April 7, 2000 was the day the general public got to see true cinematic greatness. On April 7, 2000, "Ready To Rumble" was released in cinemas.

The story of Gordie and Sean, two sewage workers who worshipped Jimmy "The King" King to the point where, after he was screwed out of the WCW World Heavyweight Championship, they hunted him down and vowed to bring him back to the top of his game. It was a movie made at the height of wrestling's popularity at the turn of the millennium, but unlike future titles like "The Iron Claw" and "The Wrestler," "Ready To Rumble" has gone down as one of the worst sports-related movies of all time, bombing at the box office and receiving terrible reviews from critics.

Naturally, "Ready To Rumble" has developed something of a cult following in the 25 years since its release, particularly amongst wrestling fans for both the fact that it is a wrestling movie, and that it can fall into the category of being so bad that it's actually entertaining. So to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the movie's release, we decided to take a deep dive into the world of "Ready To Rumble" to find some behind-the-scenes stories that even the most loyal fan of the film might not have known. These are things you didn't know about "Ready To Rumble" after 25 years.

Starting with the man starring in the lead role, David Arquette. A lifelong wrestling fan who was more than happy to step in between the ropes in order for "Ready To Rumble" to become a success, but sadly, Arquette's legacy in wrestling is chequered at best and disastrous at worst. 

The story goes that former WCW head writer Vince Russo was pitched an idea by commentator Tony Schiavone that Arquette, who was set to make a series of appearances in WCW to promote the movie, should win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Russo revealed this story on the "Who Killed WCW?" documentary in 2024, stating that everyone was fine with the idea at the time. However, Diamond Dallas Page, who was the champion at the time, and even Arquette himself, thought the idea was terrible, with Arquette getting a real perspective on the situation when he asked Booker T how many times he had held the title, which at the time was zero.

Regardless of how people felt about it, Arquette did win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship on the April 26, 2000 episode of "WCW Thunder," and held the title for 12 days before eventually dropping the title to Jeff Jarrett in a Triple Cage Match (the same cage that gets used at the end of the movie) at the Slamboree pay-per-view in May. Naturally, Arquette received nuclear heat from the WCW locker room, something that Arquette tried to avoid, but WCW was hoping for one last big piece of publicity to help them in the war against WWE. In the end, having Arquette win "The Big Gold Belt" was seen as one of the final nails in the coffin for a company that would be bought out by Vince McMahon less than a year later.

Since WCW was hellbent on giving David Arquette the WCW World Heavyweight Championship, the actor wanted to at least make a little bit of good out of his time in the wrestling business. Arquette received a hefty paycheck from his WCW appearances, but considering that he was already very wealthy from the movies he had been in, he decided to donate the money WCW gave him to a number of wrestling families who had been going through a very tough time in the years leading up to "Ready To Rumble's" release.

On October 5, 1997, the same day as WWE's first-ever Badd Blood: In Your House pay-per-view, Brian Pillman was found dead in his hotel room. He passed away at the age of just 35 from heart disease, and Arquette donated a large chunk of his WCW earnings to Pillman's family in order to help them through such a difficult time. The Pillman family wasn't the only family that Arquette gave money to, as Owen Hart's family also received a portion of Arquette's earnings following Owen's tragic death at the Over The Edge pay-per-view in May 1999, an event that actually took place in the same arena as the Slamboree pay-per-view where Arquette lost the WCW World Heavyweight Championship.

Darren "Droz" Drozdov and his family also received some of Arquette's money after Droz was paralyzed from the neck down during a dark match against D'Lo Brown before an episode of "WWE SmackDown," with Droz eventually passing away in 2023. Arquette touched on giving his money away during the "You Cannot Kill David Arquette" documentary, which received critical acclaim from those in the wrestling business, as Arquette had seemingly done the impossible and rebuilt his image within wrestling.

Much like professional wrestling, accidents can happen on movie sets all the time. So when you create a movie based on professional wrestling, it's only natural that there would be some mishaps that led to some of the stars of WCW getting injured.

During the opening scene where Gordie imagines himself wrestling in a convenience store, "Macho Man" Randy Savage makes a cameo appearance before being laid out by the other main star of the movie, Jimmy "The King" King. However, during the shooting of the movie, Oliver Platt, the man who played King, legitimately punched Savage in the face by accident, but Savage is a tough man who has suffered much worse in his career, and there was no bad blood over the incident. So much so that the outtake was actually featured during the end credits of the movie, where you can see the fear immediately come across Platt's face when he realized what he had done.

The other injury was a little more serious and ironically came in a sequence that resembled a genuine wrestling match. Gordie and Sean get tickets to see "WCW Monday Nitro," and when the audience joins them in the arena, they are watching the closing stretch of a tag team match where Rey Mysterio and Billy Kidman defeat Juventud Guerrera and Prince Iaukea, with Mysterio hitting a top rope Frankensteiner for the win. Mysterio legitimately injured his knee performing the move and ended up missing six months of action, returning to WCW after "Ready To Rumble" had been in theaters for an entire month.  

By the time "Ready To Rumble" came around, Rose McGowan had already made a name for herself thanks to her role in the 1996 movie "Scream," which coincidentally featured David Arquette as McGowan's on-screen brother. In "Ready To Rumble," McGowan and Arquette were love interests as she played Sasha, a Nitro girl who was trying to cozy up to Gordie in order to benefit her own career through the orders of the movie's main villain, Titus Sinclair. Sasha was meant to be hated by the viewing audience by the time the movie ended, but if there is one person who hated Sasha and "Ready To Rumble" more than anyone else, it was McGowan herself.

McGowan revealed in a 2017 interview with Defamer that the main reason she took the role in "Ready To Rumble" was primarily due to money, and that she had actually thrown the trash three times before finally accepting the role. The actress would go on to blame her agent and her persistent need for McGowan to take the role, stating, "I had a very big agent who basically did the mind-meld on me: 'Do this movie about wrestling.' I threw the script in the garbage three times because that's where it deserved to be. It was 'Ready To Rumble'. It was a lot of money. She just didn't care, and I mistook her for someone who was a strong woman. What she really was was a mercenary woman, and there's a difference, and one who didn't like me, either. A lot of agents aren't supportive of their talent in any way.

All of this would be revealed after McGowan became one of the first actresses to speak about disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein, with McGowan stating that Weinstein had sexually assaulted her in 1997 but was ignored by the powers that be due to Weinstein's position in Hollywood.

The main villain of the movie, Titus Sinclair, was played by Joe Pantoliano, who at the time had featured in some of the biggest movies of the 20th century, like "The Goonies" and "The Matrix. Having a name like Pantoliano attached to a movie like "Ready To Rumble" was a very big deal, but he was not the first choice for the role of Titus Sinclair.

Instead, Sinclair was meant to be played by none other than WWE Hall of Famer and former Senior Vice-President of WCW Eric Bischoff. This would have been very fitting as the Sinclair character was based on Bischoff and his on-screen persona as a member of the New World Order during WCW's peak years, but there would have been zero chance of Bischoff actually getting to star in "Ready To Rumble" for the simple fact that he wasn't with WCW when the movie was being shot.

Following a disastrous 1999 that saw the "Fingerpoke of Doom," an aging main event scene, and the band KISS getting their own wrestling character in the form of The KISS Demon, Bischoff was fired by the company, and his role in the movie was given to Pantoliano. With that said, Bischoff would return to WCW after "Ready To Rumble" came out, and was even the man David Arquette pinned to win the WCW World Heavyweight Champion.

In their own unique way, professional wrestlers are a lot like stunt actors. They perform death-defying acts with no safety net every week, and are only given one real chance to get it right as they perform their moves in front of a live audience. It's because of this that some of the lead actors in "Ready To Rumble" had the fortune of having some of WCW's most technically gifted stars act as their stunt doubles.

Back in 2007, David Arquette revealed that his stunt double was current WWE producer Gregory Helms, then known as "Sugar" Shane Helms. The man who would go on to become The Hurricane in WWE had only signed with WCW a few months before being asked to help out on "Ready To Rumble," and was picked both for his experience on the independent scene and the fact that he was a similar size to Arquette. It's unclear whether Helms got any special treatment from WCW due to his role as Arquette's stunt double, but he would go on to have a lot of success in the company's final year, even being the final man to hold the WCW Cruiserweight Championship under the WCW umbrella.

Oliver Platt also needed a stunt double for his action scenes, and for him, WCW chose Chris Kanyon, who had been a WCW Tag Team Champion in the lead-up to "Ready To Rumble" being filmed. Kanyon even got himself a cameo role in the movie as he was one of the crowd members who beat up Titus Sinclair in the closing scene. As for Scott Caan, who played Sean, he opted not to have a stunt double and did all of his own stunts.

Hardcore fans of the 17-time WWE World Champion probably already knew this, but "Ready To Rumble" was the first movie that John Cena ever appeared in. Cena appears as an uncredited extra during a scene in a gym where Gordie, Sean, and Jimmy King ask Bill Goldberg to have King's back for his eventual WCW World Heavyweight Championship match with Diamond Dallas Page. If you have trouble spotting him, just look for the very large individual with short blond hair lifting weights in the background of the scene.

While he didn't have any lines, Cena was actually asked about his bit-part role in the movie in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, stating that it laid the groundwork for him to get into acting later on in his career, and that if you take all of the extras out of the movie, it wouldn't be the same. Cena has come a long way since his cameo in "Ready To Rumble" and now has a very successful acting career of his own. His final run with WWE is set to end in December 2025, and once he hangs up his jorts for the final time, Cena will pursue acting on a full-time basis. If he ever bags himself an Academy Award, just know that it wouldn't have happened had it not been for "Ready To Rumble."

Of all the famous faces that appeared in "Ready To Rumble," there wasn't anyone with more fame and respect attached to them than Martin Landau. Originally bursting onto the scene in 1959 thanks to his portrayal of Leonard in Alfred Hitchcock's "North By Northwest," Landau had already won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award by the time he agreed to be a part of the "Ready To Rumble" cast. 

Landau played Sal Bandini, an old-school wrestling trainer who might have seemed like a frail old man, but could tie even the biggest athletes up in knots in the blink of an eye. This character was reportedly based on legendary wrestling trainer Stu Hart, the patriarch of the Hart family, who are the most famous wrestling family to ever come out of Canada. Hart had a hand in training all eight of his sons, including Bret "The Hitman" Hart and the late Owen Hart, as well as wrestling legends like Gorilla Monsoon, The Junkyard Dog, and Jushin Thunder Liger.

While Landau's portrayal of Bandini was one of the few parts of the film that fans and critics generally agreed to be one of the better parts of the movie, he wasn't even the first choice for the role. That honor goes to Jack Palance, another Academy Award-winning actor who was one of the most famous actors of the 20th century, but he had to pull out of the movie for undisclosed reasons.

Despite the movie being based on the world of WCW, one member of the cast was actually a WWE Superstar by the time it came out.

That individual was Perry Saturn, who was still under contract with WCW when "Ready To Rumble" was being filmed and frequently appears throughout the movie. Saturn and Sid Vicious are even tasked with breaking into Sal Bandini's home during one scene, but they were quickly taken care of by the trainer. However, as 2000 rolled around, Saturn had become frustrated with his treatment in WCW, and when he caught wind of Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, and Dean Malenko all negotiating with WWE about potentially jumping ship, Saturn did the same, and the four men were full-time members of the WWE roster by the end of January 2000.

"Ready To Rumble" would be released in April, and by that point, Saturn and the rest of The Radicalz had firmly established themselves as a force to be reckoned with in WWE. In fact, the first two weeks of April 2000 were extremely noteworthy for Saturn as he managed to make his WrestleMania debut on April 2, star in a multi-million dollar movie that was released on April 7, and would win his first singles title in WWE (the WWE Hardcore Championship) on April 11.

The ending of the movie sees Jimmy King finally getting the better of Diamond Dallas Page to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship, save his job as a professional wrestler, and even declare Gordie as his new tag team partner, with Sean acting as their manager. It was a feel-good ending that was the style at the time for comedy movies like "Ready To Rumble," but DDP had a different idea for an ending that, had it been given the green light, would have played into the fact that wrestling is a work.

Throughout the movie, it's clear that Gordie and Sean aren't fully aware that wrestling is scripted or pre-determined, and genuinely believe that WCW had screwed King out of his title and a job. They worked extremely hard to get King back into ring shape and ready for his redemption match with DDP, but the alternate ending that DDP pitched would have peeled back the curtain to Gordie, Sean, and the audience. DDP revealed in a 2013 "YouShoot" interview that he pitched that after everyone got backstage, King and DDP would come face-to-face once again, only to hug each other and agree to go to a local bar to celebrate the match they had just had. DDP would have then gone over to Gordie and Sean, welcomed them to the wrestling business, and invited them to the bar as well.

This would have effectively confirmed that the entire story of the movie was a work from the beginning, and that King had never fallen on hard times at all, with Gordie and Sean just being in the right place at the right time when it came to getting into WCW. However, Warner Bros. decided to stick with the original ending of the heroes standing tall, keeping kayfabe somewhat alive in the process.