John Cena’s ‘Jackpot!’ Predicts How Future Social Media Will Get Even More Dystopian

Crushing economic peril forcing otherwise sensible characters into playing potentially deadly games is an evergreen sci-fi topic — and usually, the dystopian circumstances in which the characters find themselves aren’t so difficult for us to imagine. Netflix’s Squid Game jumps off from the real crisis of personal debt in South Korea to present a 456-person, multi-round battle for a prize equivalent to $35 million USD for whoever can outlast all their fellow contestants. Stephen King returned to the idea a couple of times: we’re only a year away from when he imagined a TV network airing The Running Man, a fight to the death only slightly more horrifying than some actual reality shows, and the spirit of The Long Walk lives on in “hands on a hard body” endurance contests. The Hunger Games features players who are drafted into participating rather than affirmatively choosing to enter, except for The Girl Who Lived, in the story that kicks off the book and film franchise. Similarly, the 2001 satire Series 7: The Contenders selects its contestants via lottery and sets them upon one another until just one contestant remains. 

The last of these is the closest analogue to the Prime Video original movie Jackpot!, which premieres tomorrow. In this broad, goofy comedy, rampant income inequality drives California residents to enter a dystopian lottery that could lead directly to their deaths. What most differentiates Jackpot! from the dramas cited above, however, is which elements of our contemporary dystopia it chooses to comment on: using social media to identify one victim and sending the entire internet out to kill them is a disturbingly easy concept to grasp.

Jackpot!’s action begins just a few years after the establishment of the California Grand Lottery. In 2026, we are told via expository text screen, the Great Depression left California broke, so the state set up the lottery. Winning is only the first step toward collecting the jackpot, though. As soon as the winner’s name is drawn, their identity and location are broadcast, because if anyone else can find and kill the winner before sundown on the day of the drawing, they get the money. 

Katie (Awkwafina) doesn’t know any of this as we meet her. She’s just returned to Los Angeles after years spent in Michigan nursing her now-dead mother and avoiding the news. A mix-up involving a pair of pants rented from her Airbnb host Shadi (Ayden Mayeri) causes Katie to be entered without her knowledge or understanding, but there is hope: former mercenary Noel (John Cena) now hires himself out to protect lottery winners so that they can collect their jackpots, in exchange for a 10 percent cut. A reluctant Katie agrees, and the two proceed through a series of action set pieces. Comedy veteran Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, The Heat) directs.

The way the characters’ periodic moments of attempted emotional resonance stop the action dead made a lot more sense once I found out that screenwriter Rob Yescombe has spent most of his career writing video games, including Farpoint and Crysis 2 and 3. This may also be why there’s so little variation in the action scenes. The player getting Katie and/or Noel through them would learn a new skill or solution from each iteration of the characters getting ambushed in an enclosed space by dozens of improbably gifted assailants, if this were a video game. Unfortunately for us, it’s not.

The movie also has a casting problem, in that two of its three most famous stars — Cena and Awkwafina — are not its most talented. (A meta joke in the film’s final moments calls out the proof that the movie business is in its death throes: that the only people who can headline anymore are wrestlers and YouTube stars.) Awkwafina is vastly outclassed by frequent scene partner Becky Ann Baker, of, well, Broadway. Seeing Awkwafina opposite Mayeri’s Shadi just made me wish the two of them had played each other’s roles; I’m not saying I want to rob Awkwafina of her acting career entirely, but she makes a lot more sense as a crooked short-term landlady-turned-state-sanctioned-murderer than as a movie lead who’s required to sell a dark backstory.

But buried deep in the unfunny dialogue and monotonous action scenes are some unexpectedly effective critiques of current events. Obviously, there’s the economic story, although apart from a brief shot of unhoused people sitting next to unconcerned outdoor diners on an L.A. street, the desperation that would lead otherwise normal-seeming people to try to kill a stranger for financial gain is mostly an abstraction. Yet the notion that ordinary people would not just volunteer but pay to risk bodily harm from strangers tracking them on the internet barely needs heightening to be satirized. To cite just one infamous example, Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint in her Paris guest suite in 2016 after getting photographed by paparazzi outside her accommodations and at various stops around the city, and after posting images on her Instagram account of the jewels she’d brought with her for the trip. Not to victim-blame, but enough wealthy people have been robbed after showing off their possessions on social media to populate a listicle and inspire a trend piece.

The fact that the would-be jackpot jackers are referred to as Katie’s “fans” is another grim nod to the way social media turns admirers into partisans, and how thin the line sometimes is between obsessive love and antisocial obsession. Korean and Japanese pop idols already know what it’s like for some of their fans to use social media posts to invade their privacy — not to rob them, but to get close enough to be unsettling, or worse. Katie also has fans in the traditional sense, who wear T-shirts of her face and make banners encouraging her to outlast the killers who are stalking her. The intensity of both her fan and “fan” communities aren’t much more extreme than what might play out on Twitter any given day, although the fact that Katie’s interactions with her most fervent followers are positive suggests that neither Yescombe nor Feig has had much contact with Swifties or members of the Beyhive.

It’s a shame that this script wasn’t written by someone with any track record in comedy. Compelling ideas do get screen time in Jackpot!, but the context in which they’re raised just isn’t that funny, which the movie’s relentless repetitiveness seems intended to distract you from. If you see any positive social media posts about it from Awkwafina or John Cena, remember the dystopian game they have to play before you believe them.