Former WWE champ John Cena finally turned heel, several years too late for the heel turn to pack the necessary punch, but even so.
Cena, who transitioned from WWE megastar to B- or C-list movie star around the start of the pandemic, is back for a brief, and likely excessively lucrative, run in Wrestlemania season, booked for a main-event match with the current WWE champ, Cody Rhodes, who can use the rub that a win over a living legend like Cena can give you.
Rhodes, back in his AEW days, had a recurring TV role on a TBS game show, and a reality show that tracked his life on the road with his wife, Brandi, but Rhodes is still almost entirely unknown outside the pro-wrestling bubble.
Which is why WWE’s creative team has him in a feud with Cena, who was booked his world-title shot by winning in Saturday’s “Elimination Chamber,” and The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, who turned heel last Wrestlemania season, and is allied with Cena in a quest in which the part-timers want to one-up the full-time champ.
So, yes, the John Cena heel turn that we’d wanted 10 years ago is finally here because it serves the purpose of trying to put over the next guy marked for superstardom.
That’s how the professional wrestling business is supposed to work.
Cena, famously, resisted turning heel during his full-time WWE days, preferring to keep his image squeaky-clean for a really good reason – Cena was the most-requested Make a Wish guy out there for a long stretch, and you can’t give kids with terminal illnesses a day to remember if you’re a bad guy.
He parlayed the clean image into a movie career playing nice guys, so you can’t say it hasn’t worked out.
It was just us wrestling fans who wanted to see Cena pull a “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan and have a run as a top heel, reprising his “Doctor of Thuganomics” character from his early WWE years to play off the natural heat that he’d gained from years of being pushed down our throats as the top babyface.
Looking back, the reason Hogan was still around to turn heel with the nWo after years of “say your prayers and take your vitamins” was because his movie career never took off.
Cena, and The Rock, aren’t going to hear their names called at The Oscars anytime soon, or ever, but they’re bankable movie stars.
Their roles this Wrestlemania season are to have a blast cutting promos on Cody Rhodes to build heat toward the main event, and then for Cena to lay his ass down for the three-second tan.
Rhodes’s job: don’t hurt the big-money movie stars as all of this is playing out.
They have more movies to make when this Wrestlemania season is over.
Share
Chris Graham
