After winning the Royal Rumble for the second straight year, Cody Rhodes was in prime position to face Roman Reigns in a rematch at WrestleMania, win the championship that famously eluded his legendary father, and finally, mercifully, finish his story.
As we learned last night in the climax of a much talked about SmackDown, that’s not what’s in the cards. Rhodes told Reigns that he would not go after him at WrestleMania, sliding aside to make way for someone else to have that honor: The Rock.
Narratively, the move makes little sense. Everything WWE has been doing with Rhodes has been pointing to this particular moment, and going through 29 other competitors in the Royal Rumble match seems especially silly now. From a business perspective, however, there’s little debate that The Rock vs. Roman Reigns is the match with the greatest possible mainstream appeal, and if you can do it now, you should.
But that leaves one very big question open: When the heck is Rhodes actually going to finish his story?
PWInsider may have the answer.
The reality is this: while the story was primed to climax at Wrestlemania 40, there were already some in the company openly talking about the idea of Cody winning the World Heavyweight Championship and then challenging the winner of Roman vs. Rock for Summerslam in a title unification bout so that Cody could finally, really, we promise this time, finish the story.
There are some benefits to going in this direction, not the least of which would be restoring SummerSlam to its rightful place as the No. 2 show of the year after an unmistakable feeling that it’s fallen behind Royal Rumble in the overall WWE pecking order.
Still, you can’t help but feel that this carries a certain consolation prize feel for Rhodes. After already being asked to step aside for WrestleMania, his biggest career moment would then take place on a different show.
That’s not to mention the ridiculous notion of another title unification when WWE just went through that in 2022. Hopefully only some parts of this will end up being true, but at least there seems to be some vision to allow poor Cody to reach the point in his journey he so richly deserves.
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