Honestly, the only real reaction you can have to The Hollywood Reporter‘s announcement that John Cena — the wrestler turned meme turned actor — has joined a Transformers movie is: “Huh, he wasn’t already in one?”
Image: John Cena at the 2017 Kids’ Choice Awards, Getty / Kevin Winter
He’s such an obvious choice that it almost seems self-aware to cast him. But we all know that, if there is one thing the Transformers movies are amazing at, it’s not recognising when they have descended into self-parody. Remember that the Bumblebee spinoff is set in the ’80s, and if the costume designer and makeup artist doesn’t put Cena in a Miami Vice pastel suit and give him a Flock of Seagulls haircut, I will be bereft.
We don’t actually know anything about Cena’s role, and the synopsis from The Hollywood Reporter is lacking a description for who he could be:
The story is set in the year 1987, where Bumblebee finds refuge in a junkyard in a small Californian beach town. Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), on the cusp of turning 18 and trying to find her place in the world, discovers Bumblebee, battle-scarred and broken. When Charlie revives him, she quickly learns this is no ordinary, yellow VW bug.
Bumblebee also now has a US release date of 21 December 2018, the same as Aquaman. Someone — almost certainly Paramount and Transformers — is going to blink, which will deny us the Cena versus Jason Momoa match up we didn’t even know we wanted. But for now, rest assured that Cena and a giant yellow robot are set to take on Momoa and all the power of the sea.