July 26, 2026, 10:21 a.m. ET
SAN DIEGO – John Cena went from the “five knuckle shuffle” to white knuckling it by his newest movie.
The “Peacemaker” star swung by Apple TV’s panel at San Diego Comic-Con on July 25 to preview “Matchbox: The Movie,” his new motion comedy primarily based on the Mattel toys. Jessica Biel, Sam Richardson, Teyonah Parris and Arturo Castro additionally star within the movie, by which Cena performs an undercover CIA agent who inadvertently will get his buddies tied up in a globe-trotting journey.
Speaking on stage, Cena recalled being terrified filming “Matchbox” and famous director Sam Hargrave requested him to do his personal stunts. A trailer shown at Comic-Con highlighted numerous main stunt sequences, together with a scene the place Cena’s character hangs off a helicopter.
“I like fight choreography. Some of you have seen me do that in WWE. Becoming invisible, that’s my strength. I hate ledges. I hate heights. I hate cheating death,” he stated.
“Each day, I [pooped] my pants, because he had me jumping off of buildings. … He had me hanging from a helicopter. I did a lot of stuff that I was afraid to do. I conquered none of my fears. I’m still afraid to do them,” Cena joked, thanking his solid for being a “great support system at times when I was scared for my life.”
Biel stated she felt like “a kid again” driving real-life Matchbox automobiles, which she and her brothers performed with rising up. “It kind of revitalized my feeling about the movie industry,” she stated.
Kenneth Branagh turns into an motion star in ‘Mayday’
Also within the panel, administrators Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley mentioned “Mayday,” an upcoming action-comedy starring Ryan Reynolds as a Navy pilot who finds himself stranded in Russian territory in the course of the Cold War, the place he’s found by an ex-KGB agent, performed by Kenneth Branagh, and the pair turn out to be unlikely companions.
Goldstein stated the thought stemmed from desirous to make “a comedic version of the movie ‘Misery,'” combined with buddy motion comedies of the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties like “Midnight Run” and “48 Hours.”
“You haven’t seen Ken Branagh the action star until you’ve seen ‘Mayday,’ and I think he’s going to start getting a lot of offers that usually go to Jason Statham,” he quipped.
‘Neuromancer’ trailer launched
On the TV facet, the solid of “Widow’s Bay” and “Silo” stopped by on the panel, and “Neuromancer,” the long-awaited collection primarily based on the basic William Gibson cyberpunk novel, debuted a trailer.
Showrunner Graham Roland stated it it felt like an “appropriate time for us to revisit the text,” given lots of the ideas popularized within the novel, together with the time period our on-line world, at the moment are “part of our everyday lives.” Callum Turner stars within the collection, which premieres Jan. 22.
