It’s been a long while since any of us had seen wrestler-turned-actor John Cena hit the big screen in starring fashion for an action role. John Bonito’s The Marine was a spectacular outing for Cena in a feature lead role prior to films like 12 Rounds, Legendary and comedies like Trainwreck and coming-of-age romp, Blockers.
He’s since earned a principal role in Travis Knight’s upcoming Hasbro’s Transformers saga spin-off, Bumblebee: The Movie, potentially signaling a blockbuster return to big-scale action for one of two-titles – The other: A starring role in the long-awaited video game adaptation, Duke Nukem, heralded by fans as a mash-up of macho action hero tropes that pokes worlds of mature humor at itself with the title character, a beefed-up cigar chomping alien hunter as its central figure.
According to THR, producer Lawrence Kasanoff initially worked on bringing a film to life for about ten years until Max Payne producer, Depth Entertainment attempted his own efforts which also fell short. Last June just short of the game’s 25th anniversary, Gearbox, who owns the rights to the game franchise, confirmed in an interview with Game Slice that they were developing a film themselves with rights now at Paramount after lapsing at Dimension.
A director is still being sought for with Platinum Dunes’s Michael Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller producing the film.