John Cena is set to bring the many dimensions of his Hollywood history into his next film, Matchbox the Movie. Set for release this fall, the first trailer revealed that this movie is more than just using the IP of a beloved toy to sell a movie, but something pretty self-aware and entertaining. Not only does it have the explosive car action one would expect from something titled Matchbox the Movie, but it has a real sense of humor. For Cena, that brings together muscles he’s flexed across different genres and tones, like Fast & Furious and Trainwreck, in one movie.
Even with his years of experience, though, the movie taught him something. Speaking with ComicBook at San Diego Comic-Con, Cena revealed the myth about cars that making Matchbox the Movie revealed to him was bunk, and it was that these things don’t just keep going and going and going. “You’ve got to have 20 of them, like minimum, because they don’t run,” Cena said about working with cars on a movie. “They’re mechanical things that break, and when you drive them beyond like average capability, they f’n break.”
“You go ahead and push that car to a little bit,” Cena added. “You’re going to need a backup. So if you can run cars like they do in Hollywood, especially in a movie like Matchbox, we would go on set with like 12 Mustangs, we would bring 15 Land Rovers to the desert, because all of them broke. All of them. I was driving Four Land Rovers like, ‘Another drive shaft gone.’ But that’s the movie: to push a car to its limits, they break. So just to see, like 20 white Land Rovers or all the green mustangs or like all of our characters’ vehicles lined up in mass, it’s like, man, it takes, takes all this to make this happen.”
Arturo Castro, Cena’s co-star in the film, offered another perspective on the car myths that making Matchbox the Movie taught him: “Cars need gas, apparently. People stop for gas and stuff; in movies they never stop for gas, and we had to stop for gas a lot.”
In case you weren’t convinced about the practical nature of Matchbox the Movie by Cena’s candid response to how often the cars would break, the man behind the camera should further convince you that this film is throwing cars out into the world and filming it in camera rather than depending on VFX entirely.
Sam Hargrave directs Matchbox the Movie. Having previously made a name for himself as a stunt performer and coordinator, he became a director with the Chris Hemsworth-starring Extraction movies, action films that prioritized in-camera stunts and minimal cuts. Perhaps the same thing lies in store for us with Matchbox.
Matchbox the Movie will premiere on Apple TV on October 9.
