By Olamide Oyetunji - In just a few week, John Cena will make his long-awaited and highly anticipated debut in the Fast And Furious Franchise where he will portray series protagonist Dominic Toretto’s long-lost (and unknown) brother Jakob in Fast And Furious 9, or F9 as it has been alternatively titled.
Cena’s debut to the action series is long overdue, and it’s shocking that it took this long for one of the WWE’s most prominent stars to find his way to one of the most successful film franchises of all time.
This probably won’t come as a surprise for anyone, but one will think John Cena and Fast And Furious are a match made in cinematic heaven.
The two entities have pretty much rocked their respective worlds for essentially the first 20 years of the 21st Century, brought millions of fans entertainment, and have made enough money to fill up those bank vaults from Fast Five.
The World Wrestling Entertainment star, 42, will make his first appearance in the franchise in F9, and while details of his character are still under wraps, his poster has been shared. It sees John leaning against a blue muscle car as he is set to fill the hold left by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson after he sat this movie out.
Dwanye starred in 2019’s Hobbs and Shaw alongside Jason Statham, and will not be in F9 following his reported feud with the franchise’s leading man, Vin Diesel.
John, who revealed his poster on social media, is of course not the first WWE star to have appeared in the movies, following in Dwayne’s footsteps as well as Roman Reigns who started in Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw.
John Cena will make his long-awaited and highly anticipated debut in the Fast And Furious Franchise where he will portray series protagonist Dominic Toretto’s long-lost (and unknown) brother Jakob in Fast And Furious 9, or F9 as it has been alternatively titled. Cena’s debut to the action series is long overdue, and it’s shocking that it took this long for one of the WWE’s most prominent stars to find his way to one of the most successful film franchises of all time.
This probably won’t come as a surprise for anyone, but I think John Cena and Fast And Furious are a match made in cinematic heaven. The two entities have pretty much rocked their respective worlds for essentially the first 20 years of the 21st Century, brought millions of fans entertainment, and have made enough money to fill up those bank vaults from Fast Five.
Although he doesn’t have the same name recognition and cultural relevance as, say, Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, or The Rock (more on him later), John Cena has had the most successful wrestling career of the 21st Century and is up there as one of the greatest in the history of sports entertainment.
Since his debut with WWE in 2002, Cena has racked up dozens of title reigns, millions of dollars, and has met with over 600 kids through the Make-A-Wish program. He’s a household name and brings a little something for kids and adults alike.
It doesn’t matter if wrestling fans love him or hate him, Cena has been able to consistently get a response out of everyone. During live events where Cena appears, entire arenas break out in dueling “Let’s Go Cena/Cena Sucks” chants throughout his entrances, matches, and while he’s walking back up the ramp. People love to hate Cena as much as they love to love him.
With the responses he has gotten from wrestling fans throughout his career, it’s no surprise that Cena followed the path laid out by Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, and The Rock did before him. He went to Hollywood.
As John Cena’s wrestling career started to heat up in the early 2000s, the wrestler tried his hand at acting with not the best of results. Between 2006 and 2011, Cena starred in four WWE-produced features, two of which were direct-to-video releases.
John Cena started to turn things around in 2015 with brief appearances in films like Trainwreck, Sisters, and Daddy’s Home. That trend would continue in the years to follow with the 2017 animated feature Ferdinand and the 2018 comedy hit Blockers.
Cena followed up his back-to-back hits with a co-starring role in the 2018 Transformers film Bumblebee. With nearly $500 million in ticket sales, Cena proved that he could handle an action blockbuster that could make a ton of cash. And it looks like that’s where Cena is going to be staying for the near future with appearances in this year’s Fast And Furious 9, and the 2021 release of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad.
When John Cena makes his appearance as the villainous Jakob Toretto in F9, he won’t be the first wrestler to appear in the action franchise. Heck, he won’t even be the second. The series has a history of featuring wrestlers and combat sports stars, more so in the previous few entries than in the early goings of the franchise.
The most prominent and successful wrestler to be featured in the series is none other than Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who like Cena is doing now, was able to transition from the “most electrifying man in sports entertainment’ to one of the most profitable action stars in recent history.
Ever since the 2011 release of Fast Five, Johnson has become a bigger and bigger part of the Fast And Furious franchise, and he was even given his own spin-off film with the 2019 Hobbs & Shaw. The first trailer from F9 doesn’t explicitly show Johnson returning as Luke Hobbs, but you never know when The Rock might show up and take on John Cena again.
There have also been other wrestlers from the WWE to show up in small roles in some of the later Fast movies, including Johnson’s “relative” Roman Reigns, who appeared as Mateo Hobbs, the long-lost brother of Luke Hobbs in Hobbs & Shaw, for a brief, yet brutal action sequence near the end of the blockbuster.
Before her tenure in WWE started, former UFC champion Ronda Rousey appeared as a bodyguard in Furious 7, where she took on Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) in a memorable one-on-one fight.
Perhaps Cena will continue to follow Johnson’s footsteps when he appears in the latest entry of the Fast And Furious franchise. And please, please, please, let us see another fight between two of the most successful and muscle-bound wrestlers the world has ever seen.
He previously revealed that he felt he had to prove himself to the rest of the cast, telling Entertainment Weekly: ‘The global connection the franchise has with its fans and the respect that the franchise has for its fans is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. ‘It allowed me to really look at the absolute analytics of the project through the people who have been working some 20 years on this.
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