The 2026 Royal Rumble ended with Roman Reigns standing tall, but WWE had someone else in mind for the win.
The third season of WWE Unreal, the Netflix docuseries that goes inside WWE’s decision-making, shows that the company had planned for Bron Breakker to win the men’s Royal Rumble before changing course to Reigns. Per the series, the pivot was made in part to avoid a repeat of the backlash Reigns himself faced after winning the 2015 Rumble, and out of a concern that pushing Breakker to the win could turn fans against him rather than behind him.
The Breakker plan was not a complete secret. Dave Meltzer reported in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter shortly after the Rumble that Breakker had been the intended winner, part of a scrapped plan that would have had him lose to CM Punk at the Raw Netflix anniversary show, win the Rumble, and then take the World Heavyweight Championship from Punk at WrestleMania 42 to anoint him as the company’s next top star.
That plan changed when Seth Rollins suffered a shoulder injury, which forced WWE to rework its entire WrestleMania 42 board. With the top of the card reshuffled, the choice for the new Rumble winner came down to Reigns or Cody Rhodes, and WWE went with Reigns, who chose Punk as his WrestleMania opponent.
The comparison to 2015 is a pointed one. That year, Reigns won the Royal Rumble in Philadelphia to a chorus of boos from a crowd that felt he was being pushed to the top ahead of favorites like Daniel Bryan. It became one of the most cited examples of WWE forcing a star before the audience was ready, and the concern raised in Unreal was that a Breakker coronation could land the same way.
Breakker did not last long in the Rumble itself. He entered at No. 2 and was immediately attacked by a masked man who hit him with a stomp on the floor, allowing No. 1 entrant Oba Femi to eliminate him almost right away. That angle has since fed into a program with the returning Seth Rollins.
