For many years John Cena was the face of the WWE, but now he rarely appears on WWE programming. Cena is focused on his acting career at the moment, and his movie roles take up a great deal of his time.
With John Cena busy working on movies, Roman Reigns was pushed to the forefront, but Reigns is now out of action while he focuses on his battle with leukemia.
Vince McMahon addressed John Cena’s status during WWE’s recent fourth quarter earnings call, and he commented on the fact that the company has essentially lost two of its biggest stars for now.
“The unfortunate aspect of sometimes in our business, is that we… our performers are not cartoons. They get hurt. This year, leading up to where we are now, we’ve had an inornate number of injuries. And when you have injuries… you know, there’s a whole bunch of them. Roman Reigns being the principle among them. And even John Cena, not an injury type thing but we thought we were going to have John be more of a part of our programming than we do. John, God bless him, is making more movies. And even John, I would think, would say, ‘Geez, I thought I was going to spend more time with what I love to do,’ which is WWE. So, he’s been coming in and out, he’s not really a part of out storyline. You lose John, you lose Roman Reigns.”
Vince went on to say that the company has also had to make a lot of changes because so many of WWE’s top stars have been sidelined due to injury.
“In addition to that, we’ve had injuries… Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch, who is one of our top female performers, was injured. Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, Bray Wyatt, Charlotte Flair, Alexa Bliss, Braun Strowman, Dean Ambrose, Ember Moon, Samoa Joe, Akam from a new tag team, Jason Jordan, Fandango, Big Show, Seth Rollins. It’s like we… you had all these injuries, which is really unusual for us, and they’re characters. It’s no different if you’re writing a soap opera and all of a sudden your main character wasn’t there. You’re in the middle of production, what do you do? You very nimbly change the storyline, but it’s not as good as the original one. Sometimes it is better because we’re pretty good at it, but those are things that we’re faced with, and one of the reasons why television ratings have dropped. And one of the reasons, obviously, from a live event standpoint, that’s dropped too. Because if you don’t have your favorites on television, obviously you can’t see the at a live event either. We’re wide open and Ronda’s done an extraordinary job. There will be other individuals coming from different areas that will join us on a longterm basis, that will help us as well.”
Who do you think WWE’s next top star will be? Sound off in the comments below.
H/T Wrestling Inc.
