A 'Duke Nukem' Movie Starring John Cena Is Hollywood's Latest Bad Idea

Remember Duke Nukem? The video game in which a muscle-bound bro fights aliens with a rotating arsenal of weapons, occasionally stopping to quote They Live and Army of Darkness? Well, now that Hollywood has officially run out of ideas, they've decided to turn it into a movie, and they want wrestler and baggy suit enthusiast John Cena to play the part. Groovy.

When Hollywood saw the breadth of its domain, it wept for there were no more worlds to conquer. So it decided to make a Duke Nukem movie. The Duke Nukem video game series was created in 1991, starting off as a 2d game before evolving into the 3D first-person shooter game I used to play in DOS mode on the family computer when I was in grade school. The time of Duke Nukem the game has come and gone, but that won't stop Hollywood: Variety reports that Paramount is forging ahead with a Duke Nukem film, and they want John Cena to star.

The film will be produced under Paramount's Platinum Dunes, which is operated by Michael Bay, Andrew Form, and Brad Fuller. A Michael Bay-produced Duke Nukem film is the most on-the-nose idea Hollywood has ever had, so this all makes perfect sense. There have been attempts to get a Duke Nukem movie off the ground since the 1990s. The original plan was to make a film about aliens invading a strip club owned by Mr. Nukem, but the film never happened. Talk of a film started up again in 2001, only to die down again until 2008, when Max Payne producer Scott Faye revealed he was planning on making a Duke Nukem movie. Obviously, that never happened either (probably because people finally got around to seeing the abysmal Max Payne).

The concept of the game is simple enough that it could be molded into a big, loud action movie: aliens invade earth, and the only person who can stop them is Duke Nukem, an extremely horny super-bro who likely exists solely on a diet of raw protein powder. Through the game, Duke racks up a series of increasingly preposterous weapons – my favorite was always the gun that froze enemies, enabling you to them kick their frozen bodies and shatter them into millions of pieces. Somehow, this idea inspired close to twenty different games, including Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem II, Duke Nukem 3D, Duke Nukem 64, Duke Nukem: Total Meltdown, Duke Nukem: Time To Kill, and so on, and so forth.

One of the most recent games, Duke Nukem Forever, spent nearly 15 years in development. Originally scheduled for release in 1997, the game languished for years due to behind-the-scenes problems and lay-offs. When Duke Nukem Forever was finally released in 2011, the reaction was not positive. Many felt the game's technical aspects were flawed or lacking, and that the series' trademarked crude, sexist humor was incredibly dated. Official Xbox Magazine wrote that the game wasn't "so much offensive or misogynistic as just suffering from an adolescent fixation with boobs and crowbarred-in innuendo."

I'm not going to say a Duke Nukem movie is the worst idea Hollywood has ever had. But it might be close.