WWE fans have been watching John Cena make a fool of himself on TV the last few weeks in an attempt to lure the Undertaker out of retirement, giving us the “Part-Timer vs. Retiree” match we’ve been dying for. Between movies like the upcoming comedy Blockers, his attempts to become the new Blue’s Clues host, and hosting Nickelodeon awards, Cena is almost entirely a Hollywood actor now, and it looks like he’s confirmed for his latest major gig: Duke Nukem.
A couple of months ago Cena was said to be the top pick to play the block-headed video game icon, and now producer Andrew Form has confirmed it to Cinemablend…
“Yeah, that’s what we’re working with now. He is. Yes,” Form said. “We don’t have a script yet, so that is confirmed at this point but if he reads the script and he doesn’t like the script I’m sure there’s ways that he could pull out, but right now he’s our guy.”
Cena definitely looks the part, but he has a squeaky clean image that runs counter to the brash, misogynistic Nukem. Form admits that one of the film’s major hurdles will be finding a way to retool the character so that he fits in a #MeToo and #TimesUp environment, while still maintaining the edginess that fans dig about him. Basically, they want to turn Duke Nukem into Deadpool.
“You know that having a misogynistic guy in today’s world, how do you make that fun and lovable and at the same time he’s got to be an incredible badass, so those are the things that we’re struggling with and we’re going to try and come out with what I hope is a really fun ride. That’s the goal, is for it to be a really fun ride…It’s going to be about tone. That’s about tone. How do you nail that tone in the way that Deadpool nailed the tone? I think we have to do that and if we don’t get the tone right then we’re not going to make the movie.”
The last major film based on a first person shooter video game was 2008’s Doom, which starred another WWE veteran in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It was a terrible movie that bombed at the box office. Maybe if Duke Nukem succeeds Cena can use it to launch a WrestleMania match with Johnson in a few years.
