During “Randy’s” final dive, the camera does not follow him to the mat, but remains focused on where he had been standing on the ropes. The crowd is heard cheering, then suddenly the screen goes black and silent. Several seconds later, the soundtrack music commences, followed by the end credits. The death of Randy is not explicitly shown, leaving the end of the film ambiguous and open to interpretation. Although many viewers felt the ending allowed for the possibility that Randy survived, producer-director Darren Aronofsky confirmed Randy’s death in an interview dated 9 Jan 2009 posted on Film.com.
       The opening credits are shown over a montage of 1980s-style wrestling posters, magazine covers and newspaper articles that depict the fictional Randy’s early career through its peak. The sound of a crowd is heard chanting in time to the soundtrack music, under announcements made by sportscasters. The sequence ends as an announcer calls the final “spots” in the 1989 Randy “The Ram” vs. The Ayatollah match held at Madison Square Garden that is later referenced in the story. According to a 25 Dec 2008 LAT article, the visual montage was designed by Kristyn Hume, who spent a year creating in Photoshop the fictional publicity material for the two-minute sequence, facetiously using the names of her friends and family to create fictitious opponents for Randy. After the montage sequence, the first scene begins with a written statement appearing over the action that reads, "Twenty years later." Later in the film, several highlights from the “Ram vs. Necro Butcher” match appear as brief flashbacks that are interspliced with events occurring fifteen minutes after the bout, as the crew cleans up and the wrestlers receive medical attention. At one point in the film, the character “Cassidy” mentions the 2004 Icon production, The Passion of the Christ, directed by Mel Gibson. End credits include a list of individuals and companies the producers wished to thank; a list of individuals from the wrestling community “who helped along the way”; and “a very special thanks” to the musician Axl Rose, lead vocalist of the rock band, Guns N’ Roses, from the cast and crew.
       According to an 8 Dec 2008 HR article, in the 1990s, around the time Aronofsky graduated from film school, the idea occurred to him that many successful and significant movies had been made about boxing, but few on the subject of wrestling. In a 22 Dec 2008 Newsweek article, Aronofsky mentioned that he had a brief “romance” with the sport as a child and realized that many of the legendary wrestlers he had admired who had fought at Madison Square Garden were now working for $200-a-night in small venues. Aronofsky’s idea for a wrestling film lingered undeveloped on his computer until 2002, when he read a screenplay by Robert Siegel that convinced him that he had found the correct screenwriter for the project. In a 30 Nov 2008 NYT article, Aronofsky praised Siegel, who is a former editor of the satirical newspaper The Onion, for having the right “combination of humor and drama” and stated that The Onion presented a similar kind of writing that was needed for the The Wrestler, to depict “potentially ridiculous characters…with dignity.” Siegel agreed that, like The Onion, The Wrestler is “strange, it’s dark, it’s deadpan” but that the film is not a “mockery” of the wrestlers it portrays. According to added content material on the 2009 DVD release of the film, Aronofsky realized early in the project that the film could not be set in the mainstream wrestling world, because of costly licensing issues, so set the story in the world of the independent wrestling shows.
       A 24–30 Sep 2008 Village Voice article reported that Siegel developed the script having in mind the Actors’ Studio-trained Mickey Rourke. Like the character Randy, Rourke had a successful career that peaked in the late 1980s, after earning fame and acclaim for his performances in Diner (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) and the film that drew Aronofsky’s admiration for his work, Angel Heart (1987). However, Rourke, who developed a reputation for being difficult, for walking off a set and for self-destructive behavior, was eventually shunned by producers. According to the Village Voice article, Rourke returned to his hometown of Miami in 1991 and for three years followed a childhood dream of becoming a professional boxer. Although several sources state that Rourke was away from Hollywood for fifteen years, he did make films during the 1990s, but many, as he admitted in the Village Voice article, were of poor quality and done only for much-needed money. The Village Voice article stated that, by the late 1990s, Rourke was living in a studio apartment on $500 a month.
       According to various Nov 2008 DV and Dec 2008 HR articles, Rourke was beginning to turn his career around and had spent several years in therapy when, in about 2005, Aronofsky approached him. The director stated that he realized that Rourke wanted a second chance. Although he had appeared in some significant roles in recent films, such as Buffalo ‘66 (1998), Man on Fire (2004) and Sin City (2005), The Wrestler required that Rourke appear in almost every scene. According to the 24–30 Sep 2008 Village Voice article, Rourke recalled that when he first met with Aronofsky, the director spent the first five minutes telling him how he had ruined fifteen years of his career by behaving badly, to which Rourke said he agreed. Aronofsky then laid out rules of behavior for Rourke, such as following his orders without showing disrespect and not attending clubs late at night during the shooting. According to Rourke, Aronofksy promised that if he followed his orders, he would get an Oscar nomination. In a 22 Dec 2008 Newsweek article, Aronofsky disavowed the statement as being more apocryphal, stating that what he actually said was that if Rourke would “do the work” he would be “recognized.”
       According to the Dec 2008 Newsweek article, Aronofsky spent approximately a year and a half trying to convince financiers to back the project with Rourke as lead, but was turned down because of Rourke’s reputation and the belief that he could not be “sympathetic.” A 16 Dec DV article reported that producer Scott Franklin pitched the movie to nearly every film company in the United States and found that the studio divisions did not feel comfortable with a movie about wrestling. When Aronofsky eventually felt compelled to replace Rourke with Nicolas Cage in order to make the movie, he was immediately given a $12-14 million budget, according to an 8 Dec 2008 HR article. A 22 Oct 2007 DV announced that the film starring Cage was being financed by Frenchman Jean-Luc De Fanti and Jeff Sagansky’s Winchester Capital Partners and that Summit International would handle international rights. In the 24–30 Sep 2008 Village Voice article, Rourke admitted that he was relieved, because the story paralleled his own life so closely that he was aware he could have to revisit difficult memories. However, in a 19 Nov 2008 DV interview, Rourke said that he also sensed that he would get the role back and spent a few months training, resulting in his acquiring the physique of a wrestler.
       Although Aronofsky now had significant funding and a star with box office appeal, according to the 8 Dec 2008 HR article, he still believed that Rourke was important to the film he wanted to make. In an 8 Dec 2008 HR article, Aronofsky stated that Cage, a friend of Rourke, understood Aronofsky’s feelings and bowed out of the role. According to Oct 2008 and Dec 2008 DV articles and an 8 Dec 2008 HR article, when the French sales company, Wild Bunch, was willing to front $6 million dollars to the film with Rourke in the lead, Aronofsky decided to scale down costly scenes, and Franklin slashed salaries, so that the film could be made independently on a $6 million dollar budget.
       Although an HR production chart lists the first day of production as 4 Feb 2008, the DVD added commentary reported that principal photography began near the end of Jan 2008 and ran for eighty-five days until 18 Mar 2008. One way the team found to cut costs was to shoot major scenes in front of real audiences of live wrestling matches, although that left the crew little time to block and light the sets, and forced them to work without a storyboard. The audience in the match scenes were mostly real wrestling fans attending the shows. Most of the wrestlers were playing versions of themselves, for instance, “Tommy Rotten” was portrayed by wrestler Tommy Farra, and wrestler Mike Miller portrayed “Lex Lethal.” Ernest Miller, who portrays “The Ayatollah,” is known in the ring as The Cat and has acted in other films.
       According to the DVD added content material, the troupe shot at matches on the weekends, and during the week shot other scenes. According to the Var and LAT reviews, portions of the film were filmed in New Jersey and Philadelphia, PA. Added content on the DVD release of the film named the following New Jersey locations: Hazlet, Bayonne, Elizabeth, Rahway, Asbury Park, Garfield, Hasbrouck Heights and, for the final match, Dover, NJ. The DVD material also reported that Jersey City, NJ was the site of the supermarket sequence. According to a 6 Jan 2009 Screen International article, Rourke, who had added thirty-five pounds of muscle during training, performed his own stunts. A 19 Nov 08 DV article reported that Aronofsky allowed Rourke to rewrite and improvise his own dialogue and have input into the wardrobe, makeup and tattoos used in creating his wrestling persona.
       The Chicago Sun-Times review, among others, praised the film for its depiction of the “backstage detail” about the wrestling world. Many wrestlers performing in independent shows have no health insurance, benefits or retirement plans and, as shown in the film, must play to survive but must supplement their meager pay with other work. According to the DVD added commentary, Aronofsky and Siegel discovered that few of the wresters they met had stable family lives and two significant themes in the film, the estranged daughter and the strip club being used as a substitute for family and social activity, are frequent circumstances in a wrestler’s life. The film authentically recreates wrestling procedures, such as the players’ pre-game strategizing of the “spots” or moves they will perform in a game. Like Randy’s “Ram Jam”, wrestlers develop a signature move that they use to signal victory and the end of a game. Wrestling terms, such as “heel” and “face” to indicate “villain” and “hero,” respectively, are authentic jargon. The abuse of steroids and pain medication is prevalent and, as reported by a 19 Feb 2009 Wall Street Journal blog news item, an ironic event reflecting the authenticity of the film’s story occurred when Scott Siegel, who appears in the film selling drugs to Randy, was arrested in real life for selling steroids. Another real life event mirroring the story of The Wrestler that occurred after the film was made, was reported in a 19 Jan 2009 Guardian (London) article. The article told about the unexpected death at age thirty-three, presumably from heart failure, of Paul “E. Normous” Fuchs, a 302-pound wrestler who appears in a small role in The Wrestler.
       A few points in the film were criticized as not being authentic. According to wrestler Mick Foley in an online article posted 18 Dec 2008 for www.slate.com, the sequence in which Randy slits his forehead to create blood would not occur in a small, sparsely attended crowd, and a wrestler of Randy’s magnitude, “no matter how faded,” would not go to the extreme of the staple gun sequence that was used to illustrate how far Randy had fallen.
       As noted in a 20 Dec 2008 LAT article, the score composed by Clint Mansell, who was the former lead of the industrial-influenced English rock band, Pop Will Eat Itself, was supplemented with vintage metal rock and an original Bruce Springsteen track. The guitar music in the score was played by Slash of the group, Guns N’ Roses. Springsteen composed the title song, “The Wrestler,” which was heard during the end credits. The 19 Feb 2009 Rolling Stone news item stated that there had been concern among Bruce Springsteen fans that the song, “The Wrestler,” did not receive an Oscar nomination. The article explained the rating system used by members of the Academy’s music branch and quoted Richard Kraft, a music agent, as saying that a song presented as part of end credits tended to have a harder time competing with one heard under a music video.
       The Wrestler had already won the Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival when it became the focus of an all-night bidding war after the screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award, according to a 9 Sep 2008 LAT article. Leading contenders for the U.S. rights of the film were Sony and Lions Gate, but Fox ultimately acquired the rights for $4 to$ 5 million. The North American box office gross for the film was $2,822,431. In addition to being named one of AFI’s Movies of the Year, The Wrestler was nominated for two Academy Awards, Rourke for Best Actor in a Leading Role and Tomei for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. The film won Golden Globes for Best Actor in Motion Picture-Drama (Rourke) and Best Original Song--Motion Picture (“The Wrestler”), and Tomei was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture. The film won Independent Spirit Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Feature and Best Male Lead (Rourke).
       Among many other national and international critical nods, the film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay by the WGA, for Outstanding Performance by a Male in a Leading Role (Rourke) by the SAG, for Excellence in Production Design by the Art Directors Guild, and for Excellence in Costume Design for Film–Contemporary by the Costume Designers Guild.
       Other films about professional wrestling include the 1931 Warner Bros. film, Sit Tight; directed by Lloyd Bacon and starring Joe E. Brown and Winnie Lightner; Swing Your Lady, the 1937 Warner Bros film directed by Ray Enright and starring Humphrey Bogart; and Mister Universe, the 1951 Eagle Lion Classics film starring Jack Carson, Vince Edwards and Burt Lahr and directed by Joseph Lerner. Two films made in the 1970s are the 1978 Paramount production, The One and Only, starring Henry Winkler and directed by Carl Reiner, which was set in the 1950s, and the independent 1975 film, The Wrestler, starring Ed Asner and directed by Jim Westman. A 1999 documentary, Beyond the Mat, explored the world of contemporary professional wrestling. That film was written and directed by Barry W. Blaustein and produced by Blaustein, Ron Howard, Barry Bloom, Brian Grazer and Rosenberg.