Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet Hollywood’s Beefy New Sweetheart

A torch was passed at the 96^th Academy Awards. I speak not of Cillian Murphy’s establishing himself as the leading man du jour, or Christopher Nolan’s ascendancy into a Spielberg-like box-office auteur, or even Ryan Gosling’s uncanny ability to find a brand-new way to be hot. No, instead, the Oscars proved, once again, that America is capable of sustaining the popularity of exactly one ludicrously jacked former wrestler at a time, and in 2024 his name is John Cena. This is terrible news for Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, who had a formidable run with the belt but is now relegated to second place.

You likely remember Cena’s appearance at the Academy Awards. It occurred in the midst of the show’s doldrums, when the technical achievements must be honored and momentum grinds to a halt. The producers typically come up with a gimmick or two to keep the audience engaged, and this year their solution was for Cena to present the Oscar for costume design while garishly nude, wearing only a pair of Birkenstock sandals. The whole bit recalled a famous incident in Oscars history in which a streaker ran across the stage behind David Niven during the 1974 show, and Cena reprised the role perfectly. He cut the same silhouette as he has in the wrestling ring for much of the past 20 years: oily and huge in an oddly cuddly way, with deltoids the size of most people’s waists. Cena nailed a couple of easy punchlines and sold a counterfeit humiliation about his predicament—even though there is no doubt that he looked better naked than 98 percent of the attendees.

Compare that to the Rock, also attending the show as a presenter, who mumbled a few toothless lines about cinema being a “global language” to preamble the International Feature category, alongside a flimsy joke about his co-presenter, Bad Bunny. It clunked in the room and on TV, which is the perfect corollary for the Rock’s current station in the business of celebrity. The jig is up: Cena is younger, hunkier, and unblemished by the deleterious forces of overexposure, and his protective brand-conscious instincts have not gnarled to the point that he would decline a streaker bit on national television. As such, he is about to take all of the Rock’s roles.

There has not been a single moment in American history when two imports from the WWE have shared equal dominion over Hollywood. Much like the wrestling industry itself, only one man at a time can be the world champion. The first was Hulk Hogan, who experimented with a jittery, cosmically weird, and ultimately faulty venture into crossover stardom in the late ’80s and early ’90s—after he had burned quite a few bridges with his colleagues in the ring. Hogan would play Thunderlips in 1982’s Rocky III, which is probably the fourth or fifth best Rocky film, as well as intergalactic stormtrooper Shep Ramsey in 1991’s Suburban Commando alongside Christopher Lloyd and Shelley Duvall, a role that moved Roger Ebert to write, with resonant antipathy, “Hogan’s range is limited, but not as limited as the movies he’s appeared in.”

Hogan would return to wrestling with his tail between his legs in the mid-1990s, and today performs only in the terrain of reality television. That left the Rock as the lone wrestler standing who could feasibly refine a transition into mainstream relevancy. He left WWE in 2004, following the promising yields of The Scorpion King and The Mummy Returns, and never looked back. The Rock became nuclearly successful with billion-dollar franchises like Fast & Furious and the greater DC cinematic universe, flexing an uncommon affability and precise comic timing that catapulted him to rarefied tiers of fame. (There was even a moment in 2017 when audiences were openly sizing up the Rock’s presidential bona fides.) However, more recently, the Rock’s film career has petered out a bit, the result of a combination of turgid movies (Black Adam), box-office slaughters (Jungle Cruise), and rumors of interpersonal on-set toxicity. (Consider the wealth of bad vibes that have leaked from the Fast & Furious crew over the years.) Unsurprisingly, with only two films on his docket in 2024, the Rock has found himself back in the wrestling ring for the first time since 2013. He is main-eventing Wrestlemania this year rather than opening a blockbuster, which can only be perceived as a downgrade in status.

Cena clearly sensed an opportunity and has filled the Rock’s gap seamlessly. The man is riding perhaps the greatest hot streak a wrestler-cum-actor has ever enjoyed, thanks to his unique nerdy charisma and ability to demonstrate genuine cinematic vulnerability despite his hulking frame. He is excellent in HBO’s psychotic Peacemaker, which is one of the few survivors of the great superhero flick purge, and he’s coming off a 2023 in which he appeared in six movies—including Barbie, where he played the instantly iconic Kenmaid. There is a levity, and newness, to Cena’s reign that has made him unimpeachable—he’s an ubermuscular toy that auteurs can’t wait to play with. More importantly, his body mass is not integral to his creative range: Cena is booked for a movie directed by Paul Feig—of Bridesmaids fame—later this year, which is the exact sort of aesthetic mashup that gets my blood up. Over the past several years, the Rock, meanwhile, has starred in the disaster flicks San Andreas, Skyscraper, and Rampage, which each asked him to represent the exact same imperious ass-kicker he is in the ring. He’s never quite challenged himself in the same way.

In fact, you could make the argument that Cena isn’t even competing with the Rock for the same turf, especially when a different rival is coming into view. Dave Bautista, who was not as famous as either men during his time in the WWE, has carved out a remarkable niche as a mega-yoked aesthete. He is a Marvel Avenger, a Dune villain, and a Blade Runner replicant, and has made time to appear in a variety of artisanal big swings, like Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron and Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion. I like to imagine Bautista and Cena eyeing each other from across the ring, with the title on the line. The Rock? Well, he tapped out long before the main event.

Because, truly, there is only one more achievement a wrestler has yet to reach in Hollywood. Eventually, someone is going to need to brandish an Oscar as a winner, rather than a presenter, thus putting the art of professional wrestling adjacent to aureate, mainstream prestige. Cena has the inside track. Make the phone call, Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimer would’ve looked better with massive biceps anyway.