Over the last decade, the Fast & Furious franchise’s reinvention into a globetrotting series of bonkers blockbusters has coincidentally attracted a number of professional wrestlers, all of whom tasted championship gold in the WWE either before or after boarding the ensemble.
Dwayne Johnson has been a key part of the mythology for ten years having appeared in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth installments, while he also headlined spinoff Hobbs & Shaw alongside Jason Statham, and he roped in his cousin Roman Reigns to lend support in the latter as a member of the extended Hobbs clan.
John Cena, meanwhile, who has tangled with both Johnson and Reigns inside the squared circle on more than one occasion, will soon be seen as Jakob Toretto in next month’s Fast & Furious 9, and he’s already calling himself the brand’s best villain ever. If that wasn’t enough, Ronda Rousey appeared in Furious 7 two years before she inked a WWE contract, but when it comes to Dave Bautista, it seems he wasn’t sold on the idea of adding his name to that list.
In a new interview, the Guardians of the Galaxy star revealed that he met with Universal, and after he was asked about his interest in joining The Fast Saga, he pitched them a Gears of War movie instead.
“I don’t make any pretense about it. I had a chance to get a meeting at WB, they were talking to me about this and that and I said, ‘Hey, let’s talk about Bane’. That happened to me one other time in my career. They wanted to talk to me about Fast & Furious, and I said, ‘I’m not interested, let’s talk about Marcus Fenix’.”
Bautista has hardly been shy in voicing his desire to star as the console favorite’s protagonist, and admitted a couple of years back that he’d tried his hardest to get the project off the ground. A live-action Gears of War film has been stuck in development hell for well over a decade at this point, and even with the actor’s star set to continue rising in the coming years, it still might never escape.
