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Let’s say you go to the movies to watch the next John Wick movie. Jon has gotten his calm, normal life and has even been given a puppy from the same pairing of his original dog in the first movie. Then, a dark figure from his past shows up, attacks him, kills the new puppy, and leaves him laying, having taken his calm life, his happiness, and did it through cracking computers to find out where he has retired to. As the villain leaves, Wick is left laying.
Then, the screen says “The End” and the lights come up.
Would you want to see the next John Wick movie, whenever it comes out?
People in the Q and A section as well as on various audios have asked: After his loss at WrestleMania, can Cody still be as hot as he was?
I am not a psychic, but history shows it is going to be hard.
Cody Rhodes was a misused midcard talent in his first WWE run, and he famously asked for his release to rebuild himself. He worked the indies, he worked hard, he didn’t have a gimmick other than he was the son of Dusty Rhodes and he was the most under-rated wrestler around.
He played into the “WWE misused me” and backed it up with a run of great matches in any mid level federation that would hire him. He was smart enough not to join TNA during the late 2010s, as, for the most part, that’s where former WWE talent went to grab a paycheck and hope for a callback. When he did work with TNA, he was careful not to commit to them, and kept working with Ring Of Honor and New Japan, and only stayed in TNA for about 5 months.
He was also smart enough to not badmouth WWE in his shoot style interviews.
He built his career on great matches, benign someone who could be counted on, and partnering up with the Young Bucks and Kenny Omega. He was able to craft the narrative that WWE had misused him, but he never said it himself. He also didn’t stop anyone else from saying it, so he was able to get that fan support. In the 2010s, one of the biggest frustrations fans had was that WWE misused the people they liked, and Cody leaned into that hard.
He leveraged it to build up Ring of Honor to the point where they could run a large arena (without their name being on it) as a show put on by Cody, Kenny, and the Bucks. He then leveraged THIS into All Elite Wrestling.
This whole time, he built himself up in the eyes of the fans. He pushed that he was on a crusade to Change The World. As AEW started up, he DID lean in to “we’re taking on the monster” which several shots at Triple H in promos and vignettes, up to the infamous “sledgehammer to a gimmicked throne” bit. In AEW, he tried to position himself as the White Knight for the fans.
He said he would never go heel, even though he did a LOT of heel lite stuff in his matches. He lost a match for the World Title where he said if he lost he would never challenge for that title again, which put a ceiling on him in the company. So, he dominated the new TNT Title instead. Because he’d set that limit on what he could do, fans started to lose interest in him. His matches, which had gotten a massive reaction when AEW went back to arenas after the pandemic, started to cool.
This is when he started giving the “I will never turn heel” interviews, but storyline wise, he started on a dreaded losing streak, alienating his friends and family. They clearly had a direction in mind, and it might have worked to bring him back in the AEW fan’s eyes. But, instead of having him reach rock bottom and rise back, he simply went back to his old training grounds, threw a tantrum and declared he was all better now.
During this miserable failure of an ending for the story, Cody also dealt with Malakai Black. Black was to come in as a mysterious heel for Cody to lose to, and then come back for a big victory. The problem is that Black was another guy who fans felt WWE had misused, so when he came in, it didn’t matter what horrible things he did to Cody, the fans cheered him.
Black squashed Cody in their first meeting. I don’t mean he beat him in a hard fought match. I mean Black beat him as if he was George “Scrap Iron” Gadasky, and Black was Ray Stevens looking to earn the name “The Crippler”. Cody then was off TV for a while. Not a word from him. No “He’s sent in this video” where Cody vowed revenge. No training montage. Nothing. He was beaten and gone.
And that was what killed him in AEW.
He came back and got his win back, but the fans were done with him. He endlessly lost and won back the TNT title, it felt like he teased turning heel every time interest started to wane, and with no chance for a World Title, he’d lost the fans. He had subsequent feuds with Sammy Guevara and Andrade, but it was over. He left AEW soon after, citing personal issues, but his self-imposed limitations had killed him.
To stay in AEW, he would have needed a complete re-invention.
In WWE, he got that reinvention. He had a story, to win his father’s title. He was the Prodigal Son. WWE fans, for the most part, didn’t know about his time away, they just knew he’d been gone for almost a decade and was back, and looked like a star. He had a simple story that the fans jumped on because of the long time Roman Reigns had been the heel champion. WWE hooked everyone with the rise of Cody with twists and turns along the way. He was on top and followed a lot of the same story beats as when he worked his way up on the indies.
Then came the Rock and John Cena. The build to Mania wasn’t about Cody, it was about Cena, and again, Cody lost the fans. Just like in AEW, when confronted with something bigger than how he’d been built, he couldn’t keep up. In AEW, it was the terrible ending of his “crisis of faith” and Malakai Black winning the fans. In WWE it was Cena’s heel turn and his inability to come off as the toughest defender of all that is Good.
Even if Cena lost, the bloom was off the rose. Cody couldn’t keep up on promos, he didn’t know how to rally the crowd, and in the end Cena beat him after humiliating him on the way to WrestleMania. The next night, did Cody vow revenge? Did he attack Cena for cheating and taking the title he’d fought so hard to win? Did he get told he’d have to earn another title shot and he was at the back of the line?
Nope.
He wasn’t there.
He was another person Cena had beat for the title who was to be forgotten as we move on to the next pay per view. If I were much more cynical than I try to be, I would think he’s just another guy WWE built up to put over John Cena, and if you look over WWE’s history, you would see that is the pattern here.
Can Cody be rehabbed? Of course. Serialized fiction is built in such a way that it can be course corrected. Batman gets Robin back, soap operas bring back beloved characters, and Spider-Man can have his marriage erased by supernatural means…
OK, not all course corrections are any good.
But WWE will have to sidestep the mistakes Cody made with his own stories. They will have to do something different from when Cena squashed everyone who was ever a threat. And they will have to stay the course, because it’s going to take a while. They can’t have Cody go out to the barn and yell at his family and then say he’s all better the next week. We can’t have Bob Backlund come out and say “He’s tough now!”
Plus, WrestleMania may have disappointed us, but it was the most profitable event in WWE history, according to them. I got bored with Cena's decade of dominance, but it built the company into a money making machine. Unlike other people in the commentary business, I know that what I like and what makes money are not always one and the same.
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