Jackie Chan and John Cena shot Hidden Strike in China in 2018, an escort mission along Iraq’s Highway of Death; the action comedy then waited five years for a release and ended up as the most watched film on Netflix in 54 countries.

Hidden Strike is a film that spent far longer waiting than shooting. Jackie Chan and John Cena made it in China in the second half of 2018, as a security contractor and a former US Marine who start out on opposite sides of a hijacked convoy in Iraq. It then sat on a shelf for almost five years and changed its name several times before it reached most of the world through Netflix on July 28, 2023. In its first weekend there it was the most watched film on the service worldwide.

The film is a co-production between China and the United States, made in Mandarin and English, with Changchun Film Studio and the Los Angeles genre company XYZ Films among its producers. Scott Waugh directed and edited it from a screenplay by Arash Amel, and Jackie Chan is also one of its producers. The cast around the two leads includes Pilou Asbæk, Ma Xinrui (credited as Ma Chunrui), Jiang Wenli and Amadeus Serafini. It runs 103 minutes and is built as an action comedy: a buddy movie in which two men who begin as enemies end up fighting in the same corner.

An oil refinery, eleven buses and the Highway of Death

The story is set around an oil refinery in Iraq owned by a Chinese company, Unicorp. Repeated attacks by a band of mercenaries led by Owen Paddock, a former special forces soldier played by Pilou Asbæk, force the plant to close, and its civilian staff have to be taken out. The job falls to “Dragon” Luo Feng (Jackie Chan) and his private security company, who load the employees into a convoy of eleven buses and set off along the Highway of Death towards the safety of the Green Zone in Baghdad. Among the passengers are the chief engineer, Professor Chang (Jiang Wenli), her son, and Feng’s own daughter, Mei (Ma Xinrui), from whom he is estranged.

On the other side is Chris Van Horne (John Cena), a former US Marine who needs money to repair a well in a rural village. He reluctantly joins his brother Henry (Amadeus Serafini), a mercenary, in an attack on the convoy, believing they are tracking down a man who once attacked them. The mercenaries raise an artificial sandstorm with a truck fitted with a jet engine and use it as cover to seize two of the buses. When the storm clears, most of the evacuees turn up safe, but five are missing, Professor Chang and her son among them.

Paddock’s real target is the refinery itself: he wants the engineer to restart it so that he can take the oil for himself, as payment for years of work he says went unrewarded. Once Chris understands that he has helped kidnap civilians, he turns against the man who hired him, and he and Feng, after a first confrontation, find themselves fighting on the same side. From there the plot runs on the elements its first act sets up: a notebook with the codes to restart the plant, the village Chris wants to help, the estranged daughter and the jet-powered truck, which comes back for the final chase.

From Ex-Baghdad to Hidden Strike

The project began as a different pairing. When it was announced in 2017 under the title Ex-Baghdad, the plan was to team Jackie Chan with Sylvester Stallone, with Scott Waugh directing a Chinese co-production on a reported budget of 80 million dollars. Stallone dropped out, and in June 2018 John Cena was confirmed in his place. The change altered the shape of the pairing as well as its age gap: Stallone was born in 1946, eight years before Chan, while Cena was born in 1977, twenty-three years after him.

Filming took place in 2018, with locations in China standing in for the Middle East. From July to November of that year Cena lived in Yinchuan, the capital of the Ningxia region, to work on the film with Chan. He was better prepared than most American actors for a long Chinese shoot: he had started learning Mandarin in 2016 to help WWE grow in the country, and he had already spoken it in public at a press conference there.

Then the film went quiet. It passed through a string of working titles, Ex-Baghdad, Project X, Project X-Traction and SNAFU, and its release kept slipping; in some markets it is still sold as Project X-Traction. A trailer under its final name finally arrived on May 30, 2023, almost five years after the end of the shoot. By then both of its leads had moved on to other work, and the film reached audiences as a project from an earlier stage of their careers.

Scott Waugh, a stuntman behind the camera

Scott Waugh, born in Los Angeles in 1970, comes from a stunt family: he is the son of the stuntman Fred Waugh and the younger brother of the director Ric Roman Waugh, and he worked as a stunt performer himself until 2005. As a director he made his name with Act of Valor (2012), co-directed with Mike McCoy and cast with serving Navy SEALs, and went on to the video game adaptation Need for Speed (2014), starring Aaron Paul, and the survival drama 6 Below: Miracle on the Mountain (2017). He also edited those three films, as he did this one.

Hidden Strike was one of two action films Waugh released in 2023. In September came Expend4bles, the fourth instalment of the ensemble franchise launched by Sylvester Stallone, which means that both halves of the original Ex-Baghdad pairing appear in the same director’s filmography in the same year, in two different films. His next feature as director, Runner, is listed for 2026.

The script is by Arash Amel, a Welsh-Iranian screenwriter born in Aberystwyth in 1976, who qualified as a barrister in the United Kingdom before turning to film. His credits include A Private War, about the war correspondent Marie Colvin, Guy Ritchie‘s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and Rise, the Disney+ film about the basketball player Giannis Antetokounmpo. The score is by Nathan Furst, who has written the music for most of Waugh’s films since Act of Valor, and the cinematographer is Tony Cheung.

Two stars from opposite ends of action cinema

Jackie Chan, born Chan Kong-sang in Hong Kong in 1954, trained in acrobatics and martial arts as one of the Seven Little Fortunes at the China Drama Academy and entered the film industry as a stuntman. Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master, both from 1978, made him a star, and Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985) fixed the style he is known for: elaborate, dangerous stunts that he performs himself, combined with martial arts and slapstick. Rumble in the Bronx (1995) opened North America to him, and Rush Hour (1998) made him a Hollywood lead.

Hidden Strike belongs to a familiar strand of his career, the pairing with an English-speaking co-star, which runs from Rush Hour with Chris Tucker and Shanghai Noon (2000) with Owen Wilson to The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), his first film with Jet Li. Here he is also a producer, alongside Esmond Ren, Hans Canosa and Joe Tam. He received an honorary Academy Award in 2016, and in 2025 he returned as the martial arts mentor Mr. Han in Karate Kid: Legends.

John Cena arrived at the same film from the opposite direction. Born in 1977 and raised in West Newbury, Massachusetts, he spent 24 years with WWE, where he became a record 17-time world champion, and wrestled his final match on December 13, 2025; he remains with the company as a brand ambassador. He started acting in 2006 with The Marine, and his film career turned towards comedy with Trainwreck (2015) and Blockers (2018). When Hidden Strike was shot, Bumblebee (2018), F9 (2021), The Suicide Squad (2021) and the series built on his character there, Peacemaker (2022–2025), were all still to come.

The supporting cast mixes the two industries. Pilou Asbæk, the Danish actor known as the spin doctor Kasper Juul in Borgen and as Euron Greyjoy in Game of Thrones, plays the villain. Ma Xinrui, known from the Chinese series Love O2O, plays Feng’s daughter. Jiang Wenli, a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy who in 2008 became the first Chinese actress to win best actress at all three major Chinese television awards, plays the engineer, and Amadeus Serafini, from the MTV series Scream, plays Chris’s brother.

A box-office miss that topped Netflix

Hidden Strike opened in cinemas in the United Arab Emirates on July 6, 2023, and was released on July 28 in the United States and around the world on Netflix. It is not a Netflix original; XYZ Films is its distributor in the United States. In theatres it grossed about 981,000 dollars, a small fraction of the 80 million reported as its budget.

On streaming the numbers went the other way. Without any promotion from the platform, it was the most watched film on Netflix worldwide in its launch weekend, number one in the United States and in 53 other countries, and it held the top spot in the United States and globally for two weeks, with 56.8 million views in its first 28 days. By the end of the year it was the sixth most watched film on Netflix worldwide in 2023.

That gap between an almost invisible theatrical run and a global streaming hit is the most telling fact about Hidden Strike. It was conceived in 2017 as a Chinese–American co-production for cinemas, with two famous faces and a desert convoy, and it found its audience six years later on a service that sells that kind of package to subscribers in dozens of countries at once. Whatever one makes of its premise, it stands as the only film so far that puts Jackie Chan and John Cena side by side, and as a record of how long a finished action film can wait before anyone gets to see it.

Tags: Netflix, action, John Cena, Jackie Chan