John Cena’s 2025 heel run was built to frustrate the fans who loved him, and he says that in the early going, the goal was not just to get booed. It was to bore them on purpose.
The strategy is laid out in the third season of WWE Unreal, the Netflix docuseries that goes inside WWE’s writers’ room, which premiered Tuesday. Cena, who turned on the fans and aligned with The Rock at Elimination Chamber in March 2025, said his plan to “ruin wrestling” ran through the ring itself.
“What does that mean to ruin wrestling? That means to take the fun away from the fans. That means to win that championship with methodical, catastrophically boring work,” Cena said. “To make people like, ‘Fck this guy.’ It was like, ‘That’s it? What a shtty main event.’ Yup, that’s what I was going for. Watch the next one.”
Cena said he understood the risk in it, and pushed the idea anyway.
“Then I was explaining like that was too boring. That was too bad. I think people are going to stop going,” Cena said. “The perspective was, ‘Hey, this isn’t heat on you. This is heat on the company.'”
That was the line Triple H eventually drew. WWE’s Chief Content Officer said he was on board with the concept to a point, but stepped in once the plan started to work against the show rather than for it.
“To some degree, John’s instinct was spot on. John earned the spot to be like, ‘Okay, well let’s take a shot at it,'” Triple H said. “But there was a certain point in time I was like, ‘This ain’t working.’ You’ve still got to deliver to these people. Hopefully he’ll do it in a manner that they don’t like that, but you’ve got to give them your greatness still.”
Cena’s run took him through a title win over Cody Rhodes at WrestleMania 41, where he broke the record with his 17th world championship, before dropping the belt back to Rhodes at SummerSlam. He has previously said the fans are what turned him babyface again by the end, and that he holds no regrets about the experiment.
