WWE has never felt more out of touch. In its Netflix documentary WWE Unreal, which was intended to give a hammed-up look inside the company, WWE’s head honcho Paul “Triple H” Levesque, talked about meeting and subverting fans’ expectations like he was a modern-day Machiavelli. The toothless series only really succeeded in demonstrating how disconnected the company is from reality, especially coming after the John Cena heel-turn disaster.
A heel turn in wrestling is when a good guy wrestler becomes a bad guy wrestler. Wrestlers do it all the time, signaling a paradigm shift in their gimmicks and their relationship with the audience. In all of Cena’s two decades with WWE he has never turned heel. WWE never turned Cena heel when his “Super Cena” persona, which had squash match victories against younger talent, turned him into a pseudo-bad-guy for fans who wanted to see another wrestler get a shot at the top of the mountain. Sure, he’s broken the fourth wall joking about turning heel, but for decades, wrestling’s Superman never wavered.
The closest thing the WWE universe got to seeing a Cena heel turn was when the late-Bray Wyatt had a cinematic match with him, where he psychologically broke down Cena’s facade in a nightmare sequence, jabbing at his insecurities as the company’s main guy. With Cena announcing his retirement tour from wrestling last year, fans were resigned to the fact that the unwritten rule of wrestling—John Cena will never turn heel—would remain.
Until, at the close of Elimination Chamber back in March, it finally happened.
Cena’s heel turn was a shocking moment in wrestling, and rife with diminishing returns. Despite big marquee matches against new company man Cody Rhodes, Cena running it back with longtime rivals Randy Orton and CM Punk, and an awkward little one-off with Cena super-fan R-Truth, heel Cena was abysmal. His matches, save for his match against CM Punk, ended in uninspired, cheating finishes without much wrestling work to compensate for their deflating endings. Adding to the stench of failure: Cena vs CM Punk happened in Saudi Arabia.
Cena’s gift of gab couldn’t save him from turning the ship around. Rather than give an inspired reason for turning evil, Cena did the thing most “just put the fries in the bag, bro” heels do: blame the fans.
His promos became repetitive, vapid, and whiny. They lacked the heat, positive or negative, to make him feel like a big deal. They ended up more like an awkward segment that fans were forced to watch out of nostalgia, or on the off-chance he’d somehow manage to surprise them. Like rubbernecking at a 21-car pile-up, a happy ending never came.
It was a stunt with added pressure because it was marketed alongside Cena’s retirement from wrestling. This farewell tour was further soured by appearances by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, known for vanity projects and meddling in all things involving a creative, collaborative process, and rapper Travis Scott’s pivotal involvement in Cena’s monumental heel turn.
WWE wound up reversing course for SummerSlam. Suddenly Cena turned face two days before his SummerSlam rematch with the new-blood face of the company, Cody Rhodes. In an impassioned dual promo-off, Cena turned off his dour, milquetoast, “the fans are fickle and no one cared about me succeeding” charisma vacuum shtick he’d been perpetuating throughout his disastrous heel run and returned to his high-energy, crowd-gesticulating self, saying he’d give Cody “the real John Cena” in his rematch. And that he did. They had arguably Cena’s best modern-day bout since his face-off against AJ Styles, with all the pageantry and physically impressive and emotionally resonant ring work in a long while.
Nah fuck off #SummerSlam pic.twitter.com/S5pMAsD5Rj
— Cultaholic Wrestling (@Cultaholic) August 4, 2025
But of course, as extra baggage to WWE’s shitty booking with Cena’s farewell tour, SummerSlam couldn’t just end with Cena waving goodbye to fans after. Following Cena’s loss and the torch passing to Rhodes, WWE fans were greeted with a bizarre shock return by Brock Lesnar, a wrestler rumored to have been on the company’s banned list after being listed in active litigation in disgraced former CEO Vince McMahon’s sex trafficking lawsuit by former employee Janel Grant.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the lawsuit accused McMahon of sex trafficking and pressuring Grant to have sex with other men at WWE. During this media shitstorm, McMahon bowed out of the company in 2022 after an investigation of an alleged affair and hush money payout with numerous WWE employees, totalling at $12 million. Bizarrely, he returned to the company to oversee WWE’s transition into a Saudi Arabia-owned sports entertainment company, TKO, alongside UFC, and subsequently fired some WWE board members. Vince was then ousted (kind of) from the company once more, selling some of his shares in TKO.
All this added a special stink to the entire affair: Cena’s farewell tour, his heel turn, his sudden face turn all paled in comparison to bringing a man implicated in an active sex trafficking trial back into the fold of the company.
In a SummerSlam post-show segment, Levesque praised himself and the impressive work he and his writers do. He described how they juggle the ongoing WWE storylines and explained how their latest twist in the never-ending wrestling saga, and Cena's final act, came about. He characterized the decision as something Cena wanted to do before retiring. Instead of taking all the credit, Levesque said Lesnar’s return was fulfilling Cena’s wishlist of opponents to face before leaving, stating, “It’s him writing the last chapter in his book.”
“My reaction was exactly what I thought it was going to be; if there had been a roof on this place, it wouldn’t be there anymore. The dynamic in the room changes when The Beast is here. Seeing Brock Lesnar come back…anything you thought was happening sort of all goes out the window because the factor of Brock now just changes that dynamic so incredibly,” Levesque said while interrupted by fans chanting “We want Brock.”
“Incredible to have him back,” Levesque said.
That Levesque and Cena had such a tone-deaf attitude isn’t surprising, given how willfully ignorant they’ve been about the elephant in the room—McMahon’s fall from grace and WWE’s cozying up to the president (and WWE Hall of Famer) Trump. Recently, Cena reiterated his unwavering love for McMahon despite his alleged crimes. Similarly, Levesque has dodged questions about McMahon—leaving Rhodes to vaguely fill in. What Levesque (and WWE by extension) hasn’t been shy about is their support for Trump, calling him “one of the most intuitive people” he’s ever met. Additionally, in a Vanity Fair interview, Roman Reigns, cousin of The Rock and another key wrestler in the company, expressed his support for Trump despite being a registered Democrat.
“I support our president. Trump is one of those guys where he’s got a vast history and a huge background,” Reigns told Vanity Fair (whatever that means). “He’s been in entertainment. He’s been in big business, politics. At this point, I’m supporting a bright future for our country. Positive and competent leadership. For us to be what we’re supposed to be—to be a world leader and carry that respect and do what a world power like us should be doing."
WWE has also noticeably stopped celebrating holidays like Black History Month and Pride Month, while laying off many wrestlers, including many of its openly queer talent. Meanwhile, their programming has increasingly aligned with UFC and resembles a glorified Republican National Convention by adopting MAGA themes. For example, a white wrestler named Chad Gable adopts a luchador gimmick called “Grande Americano”—a nod to Hogan’s disguised “Mr. America” gimmick. One of the most baffling aspects of this gimmick is the use of AI in his entrance video ($8 billion company, by the way) and his claim to hail from “The Gulf of America.”
Right now, things are worse than they’ve ever been on the WWE side of the squared circle. And the latest development in Cena’s retirement tour booking is, unfortunately, yet another poor mark on an already tumultuous journey of trying to send off the company’s it-guy.
Although heel Cena vowed that he’d “ruin professional wrestling,” it never actually happened in a conscious, kayfabe way. Regardless, WWE has undoubtedly tarnished this man’s legacy by making his farewell tour one of the worst series of booking spectacles in wrestling, and he deserves better.
