In the WWE house style there are many archetypes, but nothing is more tried and true—or, in some cases, tired and false—than the WWE Epic Main Event. As the saying goes, you know it when you see it, but the Epic Main Event is easy enough to break down into its component pieces. An EME will have a lot of cinematic spots, usually involving weapons or the environment around the ring—tables being the main one, but oftentimes the crowd areas come into play as well. It will be a bit on the slower side, for one of two reasons, with the choice between the two depending upon how generous you want to be. Either the EME will be slow to build up the drama until it bubbles over, or it will be sluggish because WWE’s main event wrestlers are generally more on the methodical side. Most relevant to WrestleMania 41‘s double main events is that these matches are usually overstuffed with outside interference and mechanics that go beyond the simple foundation of wrestling, in which a wrestling match can be boiled down to some amount of performers fighting each other to prove who is best. The Epic Main Event exists because of WWE’s longstanding suspicion that that isn’t enough.
With that in mind, the respective main events for the two-night marathon that was WrestleMania 41 were predictably both in that WWE Epic Main Event style. Taken together, they do a rather neat job of encapsulating the good and the very bad of what that style can bring. If last year’s Night 2 main event was WWE at its most giddily excessive, this year’s show offered two more measured scoops of melodrama that went down easily when they worked, and crashed and burned almost impossibly hard when they didn’t.
Let’s start with Night 1, which was by far both the superior match and the superior spectacle. Despite WrestleMania main events almost always involving one of the main titles in the company—usually the men’s world championship, though on a couple of occasions the women have gotten this slot, and once, two years ago, the tag team division got its due—this year’s Saturday night capper was low on stakes and high on theatrics. It was a triple threat match between Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins, and, in his first WrestleMania main event ever, CM Punk. That last aspect played a big role in both the story and presentation of the match; while Reigns and Rollins got typical big match entrances, Punk, the often irritating but almost equally transcendent performer who returned to WWE in 2023 after nearly a decade away, received a video package, set thrillingly to his old theme song “This Fire” by Killswitch Engage, recapping his journey to the main event. He was then played to the ring live by Living Colour, who provide his current theme song, “Cult of Personality.” (Living Colour rocks, and rocked on Saturday; it’s nearly impossible to sound good as a live music performance at a wrestling show, given the awful acoustics, but they sounded as good as anyone could have hoped.)
Once the match got started, it became a formulaic WWE-style triple threat (there’s another match archetype for you). That meant a lot of brawling outside the ring and spots that involved one wrestler being taken out for long enough that the other two could have a mini one-on-one affair. There were not one, but two table spots. The storyline was fittingly convoluted: Reigns and Rollins have a decade of feuding history behind them as former stablemates turned mortal enemies, and Reigns and Punk were fighting over the managerial services of Paul Heyman, perhaps the greatest non-wrestler character in WWE history.
Both of these storylines played out during the match with the expertise and gravitas that only a company with such a loaded history can deploy. The finish wove both of them together, too: Heyman first handed Punk a chair to use on Reigns before hitting him with a low blow right to the little Phil Brookses. Heyman then handed the chair to Reigns to hit Rollins, only to hit another low blow—these were very funny, and Heyman’s hand kind of got stuck in Reigns’ nether regions—and side with Rollins, who picked up the win. While it might be disappointing that a match between three very game and very talented wrestlers came down to interference, it fit what WWE was trying to accomplish. Heyman has been integral not just to the build of this match, but the careers of both Punk and Reigns, and so he was less an agent of outside interference and more another player in a long-running tragicomedy. His betrayals were woven into the foundation of the match, and it would not have worked without him.
The same can’t be said about Travis Scott, who played the role of outside interference in Night 2’s dud of an Epic Main Event. That match was supposed a big deal. Cody Rhodes, the winner of last year’s main event and the top guy in the company after years of reaching for the mountaintop, entered as the world champion, with, for some reason, dirtbikes and a silly golden skull mask as part of his entrance. On the other side was John Cena, the wrestler who most embodies the post-boom WWE period, in what he had announced would be his last year as a wrestler in WWE, which made this his last WrestleMania match. Cena also entered, for the first time, as a heel; he’d cemented his bad-guy status by attacking Rhodes at March’s Elimination Chamber. Cena’s own entrance was fittingly antagonistic; gone were the bright colors and cheery demeanor that had defined him over the years, and in their place was a black and white motif and steely glare and nothing else as he made his way to the ring.
That is where the problems with this main event began. Cena is an old pro at wrestling, and so he tweaked his style to be less fan-friendly, eschewing his famous move sequences in favor of a slow and plodding bit of “heel heat.” He beat Rhodes down methodically, a tale as old as time in wrestling; old enough, certainly, that fans were primed to expect an eventual comeback by the babyface champion. It’s a familiar formula, but not all that fun to watch, and the crowd didn’t play along well. It’s just too easy to ironically cheer Cena when he denies fans what they want, and that’s just what the Vegas crowd did. Still, though, while a section of heel heat can make matches uncomfortably long, the eventual payoff can be worth it. That just never came. Fans got Travis Scott instead.
A quick explanation is in order: When Cena turned on Rhodes at Elimination Chamber, Scott was also there with The Rock, who was the catalyst for Cena’s heel turn. (The Rock, hilariously, did not show up on Sunday night, despite this whole story centering around his inclusion.) Scott joined in on a beatdown of Rhodes, but since he is not a trained wrestler, he fucked up, slapping Rhodes too hard in the head and rupturing his eardrum. WWE leaned into this on Sunday, having Scott come out to antagonize Rhodes once more, first removing the referee during a pinfall attempt and then getting both into the ring and into Rhodes’ face. His inclusion boiled down to very little, but did just enough damage to sour the whole event. Scott took Rhodes’ finisher and distracted Rhodes long enough for Cena to hit the third low blow of the weekend’s main events, leading to a belt shot to the head and lackluster record-breaking title win for Cena. With the win, his 17th, Cena officially has more world title reigns than any wrestler in WWE history, surpassing Ric Flair.
Here’s the problem: Whereas Paul Heyman was an integrated part of Night 1’s main event storyline and an iconic wrestling performer in his own right, Travis Scott felt added to the Night 2 capstone, and is Travis Scott. The artificiality of wrestling is central to the broader appeal, but it’s also something to be careful with; warping it for the sake of getting an admittedly very popular rapper onto the show felt reckless, and like the act of a promotion searching for the kind of viral moment that might expand its considerable reach. The thinking goes that someone who would not ordinarily watch WrestleMania might have tuned in to see Travis Scott. It’s the same reasoning that has seen Logan Paul become not just a WWE wrestler, but someone who can win a WrestleMania match against an industry veteran like AJ Styles, which happened earlier on Sunday. It might even be solid financial thinking on the promotion’s part; in a world where entertainment keeps getting more fractured, crossover moments can breach that gap. But it also goes against the things that have made WrestleMania a tentpole show even for the sort of lapsed fans that only check in once a year.
In that way, the Night 2 main event was a more fitting conclusion to a WWE show than Night 1. Night 1 was all about self-contained wrestling excellence, a kayfabe-heavy exhibition between three massive wrestling stars that both concluded a months-long saga and hints at a new storyline in the making. Night 2, though, was all about the meta idea of “making a moment.” Cena is the biggest star WWE can trot out, at least when The Rock refuses to show up; again, this is very funny and very on-brand for The Rock, who might be the most selfish performer in WWE history, give or take a Hulk Hogan. And Travis Scott getting hit with a finisher is the type of clip that WWE will replay ad infinitum as evidence of how cool and hip (and mainstream) it can be. Does it matter to the company that it sacrificed any sort of coherent storytelling and match quality in search of headlines like “Travis Scott’s Surprise WrestleMania Appearance Left Everyone Speechless”? Apparently not.
It’s a shame, though, that John Cena’s final WrestleMania match, and his long-awaited 17th title win, were sacrificed to WWE’s worst impulses. Given how good both last year’s overbooked chaos and this year’s Night 1 melodrama turned out, it’s clear that WWE still has the fastball when it comes to its own style. But this was a huge miss, and for what? Maybe it is silly to get this worked up over an underwhelming WrestleMania match, or any wrestling match period, but there’s also a special level of disappointment that comes with biffing the season finale, and this was one of the worst examples of sacrificing the biggest match slot of the year in favor of some nebulous sense of immortality. The lasting image from WrestleMania 41 should have been Cena lifting the belt, and it was. But the company just couldn’t help itself, and so Travis Scott is also in there, a living reminder that actual wrestling, in its storytelling and character quirks and strange strengths, is never less important than in the biggest match of the year.
