The Smashing Machine

The Smashing Machine covers a specific stretch of Mark Kerr's life: college wrestling champion, winner of the UFC 14 and UFC 15 tournaments in 1997, then a Pride headliner in Japan. John Hyams had already made a documentary with the same title in the early 2000s. Benny Safdie, on his first feature without his brother Josh, turns it into a drama about the man rather than the record.

An unrecognisable Dwayne Johnson

Former wrestler Dwayne Johnson plays Kerr under prosthetics, work that earned an Oscar nomination for makeup and hairstyling. Emily Blunt plays Dawn Staples; both were Golden Globe nominees in 2026. Safdie won the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice in 2025.

Real fighters in the cage

Ryan Bader, a former two-division Bellator champion, plays Mark Coleman. Bas Rutten plays himself. Ukrainian heavyweight boxing champion Oleksandr Usyk is Igor Vovchanchyn, and Japanese judoka Satoshi Ishii, Olympic champion in Beijing in 2008, plays Enson Inoue. Wrestlers will recognise the leg attacks and ground work of an era with minimal rules.

Shot mostly on 16mm, the film has the grain of period broadcasts and lingers on waiting, locker rooms and injuries.

Reception

It scored 71% on Rotten Tomatoes and 65 out of 100 on Metacritic, but grossed only $21.1 million worldwide. In France it streams on Canal+, which airs it on 20 October at 3pm and 25 October at 5.44am.