Remember when Duke Nukem: Forever came out? There was all this hoopla made about Duke’s return. The game was gonna be this love letter to classic first-person shooters and its iconic spiky-haired pioneer. Duke was much before my time, but I remember being excited by the premise. I liked the idea of this relic of the gaming world to rise from the dead to tell Call Of Duty to go fuck itself. “Yeah, take that lazy mass produced shlock—this legend’s gonna show you how it’s done.”But then the game came out and was a lazy, ugly obnoxious piece of garbage with zero replay value. Welp, 2K Games learned its lesson. They tried to revive Duke, but audiences weren’t having it, so on to new things.
But now it looks like Duke Nukem may get his very own movie as John Cena is in talks to play the title role. Rumor has it Michael Bay’s studio Platinum Dunes is developing the film, but the project has yet to find a director.
It really doesn’t matter where I sit. Either they find some meathead that knows how to yell action and the film just going to be a Roland Emmerich facsimile, or they may coerce an actual filmmaker into doing it, and the film will end up a half-baked, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, meta pile of garbage.
But Duke Nukem isn’t a concept, nor is it even really a pitch. Duke Nukem is the character create when you’re a great programmer with terrible imagination, which is still fine as I’ve only heard good things about the first game, and I’m inclined to believe them. But trust me, as popular as the first three games were, the Nukem brand ain’t enough to bring in numbers at the box office, especially if the film sucks. Justice League bombed at the box office and the movie featured Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Jk Simmons. Please Hollywood, don’t make this movie!
