During a recent appearance on the “Busted Open Radio” podcast, Brian Gewirtz, the Senior Vice President of Seven Bucks Productions, commented on the initial proposal for a match between Roman Reigns and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson at WrestleMania 40.
Plans changed to Cody Rhodes winning the 2024 Royal Rumble, having a tag team match on night 1, and then Rhodes going over Reigns to win the Undisputed WWE Universal Title on night 2.
Gewirtz said, “That kind of led us to a pinpoint, January 1st, the promo with Jinder (Mahal) in San Diego, because at that point, it was looking very much like a possibility that Rock and Roman (Reigns) was gonna happen and we had a meeting in Rock’s — we rented a hotel room for the day in San Diego. It was me, Rock, Triple H and Nick and we talked about it all — Nick Khan — we talked about it all and Triple H was very, as you would imagine, aware and astute of the current Cody (Rhodes) storyline and brought that up and we talked about that for a while and at the end of the that meeting, this is what’s also funny that people don’t know is that everyone enjoyed the, you know, for what it was, the promo with Jinder. But what everyone was talking about at the end of it was, ‘Should The Rock sit at the bar? Should he sit at the booth? Or should he sit at the head of the table?’ And that came about super late into our meeting in San Diego at the hotel, because, as we were talking about Cody, it was said, ‘Well you know what? I hear you. Maybe we should do a little test polling of the audience and not just the audience in San Diego but the audience all over the world. What if I kind of teased it without saying it directly?’ We brainstormed on how to do that, he did it and as you saw, the place went nuts and online went nuts and maybe nuts is different degrees of nuts in terms of if you’re a diehard Cody fan and you might be, hey, wait a second. What’s he talking about here? But for the most part, it was overwhelmingly positive when he teased head of the table, and at that point, we were like, okay, that gives us our answer. We’re locked in. He did the TKO announcement, he went to WWE HQ. I have, what ended up being 96 pages of merch and t-shirt and title belt design ideas from creative services and it was pretty much locked in at that point which begs the question which I know you’re gonna ask which everyone would ask and naturally ask which is, okay, if all of that is the plan at this point in mid-January or whatever it is, why, on for the love of all things holy, do you have Cody Rhodes win the Royal Rumble? That would be your question, right?”
He continued, “Well, let me backtrack for a second and just say there’s — the idea of Cody winning the Rumble, I thought, was problematic. In full transparency. I said even in San Diego in that meeting, I thought the cleanest thing to do if we’re booking Rock and Roman is to have (CM) Punk win the Rumble and challenge (Seth) Rollins, just because there’s a difference storyline-wise in my opinion of Cody wanting to finish the story and having earned the right to finish the story by winning the Royal Rumble. Once you when the Royal Rumble, that dynamic changes from, I want to donate my hamstring to O.G. Anunoby so we could beat the (Indiana) Pacers in the playoffs. That’s not gonna happen. But Cody winning the Rumble changes the dynamic completely because it goes from something that, yeah, we all want things but now he’s got it and why would he do anything other than focus on Roman? And that’s what he naturally did when he pointed to him. Why wouldn’t he? That’s exactly what that character would do… I do ultimately want to write a second book, I think, on this whole thing… I don’t wanna say everything, but I will say, and I could say this with 100 percent certainty that the original plan is something that you, Dave (LaGreca) and many, many more people would have hated more than anything in life itself. I can’t overstate that or understate that. I can’t state that anymore clearer. But, Punk gets hurt and the dominos start falling and things start shifting and then we get to a point now where the WrestleMania press conference is coming up. We need to promote something, a main event of some sort and we’re in this space and now we get to the infamous Birmingham, Alabama promo.”
