If you haven’t heard any updates about The Fast and the Furious series moving forward…you’re not alone.
The franchise has stalled recently—that wasn’t a pun—with the final entry being in production limbo after the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023 and no confirmed date being announced for its release, other than potentially June 2026. This wouldn’t be so frustrating if the previous entry didn’t partake in the weird recent Hollywood trend, post-Avengers: Infinity War, where major blockbusters need to technically be half-movies that need to go full Empire Strikes Back and end without resolving their stories. But hey, we’re not here to talk about the film's production problems. We’re here to talk about John Cena and his future in the franchise.
Cena made his first appearance in F9: The Fast Saga—the clunkiest title of the series. Much like the series finally going into space, it was pretty underwhelming, mainly due to the movie making the bizarre call of casting him in a role that didn’t allow him to be funny. This mistake was quickly rectified in Fast X, where they let him play the role closer to his personality and have his character, Jakob, work alongside his on-screen nephew, Brian. To the surprise of no one, it was one of the best parts of the movie. When you pair a kid with the real-life pop cultural equivalent of Superman (currently a fallen Superman in kayfabe), they’re bound to have good chemistry.
One of the unfortunate decisions made in Fast X was the choice to kill him off. It was a good self-sacrifice and potentially relevant to boost the stakes moving forward, but with the absence of The Rock’s Luke Hobbs, the franchise benefited from that extra boost of charisma that Cena brings to the screen. Of course, with Dwayne Johnson slated to return to the role, following the mid-credits reveal of Fast X, it appears that the hole he left will be filled again. Following Cena’s exit from the film, the real question is whether his death will be permanent.
Cena hasn’t been confirmed to return for the final film, but it doesn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility that they could handwave the death away. The Fast and the Furious movies have the same track record as the MCU when it comes to having on-screen deaths that remain ironclad. At least with the MCU, they have magic and multiverses to yada-yada away bringing back a character. With the Fast movies, the characters stay dead for as long as it takes for the writers to find an excuse to bring them back. Everything can be explained away with memory loss and deaths being faked—still don’t quite understand how Han is still alive—and the stories usually don’t linger on the reasoning long enough to dwell on it.
When it comes to injuries, Jakob’s cause of death via car explosion doesn’t seem aggressively unsurvivable compared to everything else the characters in the series have lived through. Roman even has a subplot in F9 where he acknowledges how they’re basically indestructible. Even Gal Gadot’s return at the end of Fast X felt comical, considering she jumped off a moving plane on the world’s longest runway in Fast & Furious 6 without so much as a scratch on her. The only character they can’t bring back, for obvious reasons, is Paul Walker’s Brian. However, speculation always comes up that they’re considering giving it a shot, especially since Brian is still alive in canon.
Back on the topic of Cena. The only real obstacle to keep him from returning, if the film does start production this year, is the farewell tour he’s undertaking back at the WWE. He’s got roughly 15 confirmed dates to appear on live shows and Premium Live Events for the remainder of the year, with his most recent appearance being his title defense against CM Punk at Night of Champions in Saudi Arabia. Considering there are about 26 weeks left in the year, it sounds like he'll have a packed schedule.
It would be wildly ironic if, in Fast X: Part 2, Cena’s Jakob would return and somehow work alongside Johnson’s Hobbs. Considering, at the time of writing this, the two of them haven’t been seen together since WWE’s Elimination Chamber back in March, when Cena shocked the entire internet by turning heel and joining forces with Johnson’s occasionally evil ‘Final Boss’ persona. Imagine the heat that’ll draw from wrestling fans if Johnson couldn’t be bothered to show up to the main event of WrestleMania 41 to be the deciding factor of a storyline that he himself started, but they’re seen on-screen together in Part 2 in heroic roles.
That would probably draw some ire from a particular niche group of the audience. It still couldn’t be as harsh as the audience reaction to Johnson’s infamous post-WrestleMania interview on The Pat McAfee Show. Either way, while the likelihood of Cena returning for the concluding chapter of The Fast and the Furious franchise seems low, it doesn’t seem completely unrealistic.
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