“Falcon PUNCH!” and “Falcon KICK!” are truly iconic lines in video gaming, and were F-Zero and Super Smash Bros. hero Captain Falcon ever brought to the big screen, they’d need to find just the right actor to deliver them. Now, we may have our answer, as artist Jackson Caspersz has imagined what it might look like if Fast & Furious 9‘s John Cena walked into a bar in Mute City and challenged Samurai Goroh to a race to the death.
Captain Falcon is the de facto lead of Nintendo’s long-running futuristic racing series F-Zero. Debuting as a launch title on the Super Nintendo in 1990, it was followed by the excellent F-Zero X on N64 and then 2003’s even better F-Zero GX/AX on GameCube and in arcades. The final entry was a Japanese-only GameBoy Advance release in 2004 and since then… nothing.
Well, not quite nothing. Aside from racing, Captain Falcon has built up a lucrative side career in the popular Super Smash Bros. games, appearing in every single entry and becoming known for his extravagant personality and fiery special moves. And down below, you can see how Cena would look in the role.
While it’s unlikely that F-Zero would get a movie adaptation, there’ve been whispers that Detective Pikachu writers Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit would like to make a Smash Bros. adaptation, bringing together all of their most-loved heroes in a metafictional tussle for supremacy. And, as one of the original twelve characters in 1999’s Super Smash Bros., Falcon would almost certainly be in the movie.
Fan-casting Super Smash Bros. is fun, if a little exhausting given that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will have upwards of 88 playable characters once its second batch of DLC is complete. But hey, the LEGO movies and Wreck-It Ralph proved that combining characters from many IPs for a crazy adventure can work, so fingers crossed that the lawyers can work out the IP conflicts.