Was The John Cena/Roman Reigns Contract Signing Promo A Shoot?

John Cena and Roman Reigns are set to square off against each other at No Mercy. So naturally, they had to sign a contract in the ring. Monday night on Raw the contract signing segment got a little out of hand leaving some to wonder if it was in the plan at all.

Roman and John went at each other hard and threw some major verbal bombshells in their opponent’s direction. When John Cena said he’s still around because Roman can’t do his job the fans in the arena were wondering what was really going on.

There was also a time when Roman Reigns appeared shaken up and Cena replied, “it’s called a promo kid, if you wanna be The Big Dog you’re gonna have to learn how to do them.” Apparently, that line was one of the only parts not scripted because Dave Meltzer confirmed that most of the segment was totally planned.

Even though it was scripted, it was certainly executed to give off an appearance of a shoot segment. When John Cena said goodbye to the fourth wall, that sparked even more, doubt that they were supposed to be saying what they were getting away with on television.

Dave Meltzer said on Wrestling Observer Radio that Roman Reigns is still the future of the WWE and this is the promo they went with to further establish that. It might look like WWE is booking Reigns to be the heel in this feud with Cena, but the promo was scripted nonetheless.

Regardless of how the promo came about it was really entertaining and had fans on the edges of their seats which is a rarity but totally welcomed. It’s not every day when a promo hits home like that one did and these two played their parts very well.

Just chalk this one up to John Cena being on top of his game and WWE giving Roman Reigns the faith to stand toe-to-toe with Super Cena. No Mercy is going to have much bigger stakes, that’s for sure.