Jim Cornette On John Cena’s WWE Return Match Being On SmackDown
John Cena’s WWE return match will be on Smackdown instead of a Premium Live Event, so Jim Cornette has chimed in with thoughts as to why it’s on a TV show.
A huge match was announced on the December 16th episode of Smackdown. When Roman Reigns was in the ring with The Bloodline for a main event promo segment, they were interrupted by a special video message featuring John Cena standing in front of a brick wall.
Cena informed Reigns that he’s going to team up with Kevin Owens against Reigns and the “Honorary Uce” Sami Zayn on the December 30th edition of Smackdown. Cena was previously advertised for that final Smackdown event of 2022 taking place in Tampa, which is where Cena lives.
During Cena’s promo, he noted it will be his first match of 2022 (on the second last day of the year) to keep his streak going with at least one match in WWE since his 2002 debut.
On a recent episode of the Jim Cornette’s Drive-Thru podcast, the legendary wrestling manager Jim Cornette talked about Cena’s appearance. Cornette knew John Cena very well because when Cena was training at OVW, Cornette was in charge of the show. Fast forward 20 years and Cena’s one of the greatest superstars of all time that’s wrestling in a huge match next week on Smackdown on Fox.
As he discussed Cena’s return, Cornette made the point that pay-per-views might not be as important as they used to be and Fox is paying WWE a lot of money, so that’s a factor too.
“Well, not for a pay-per-view, what pay-per-views are there now? Well, but at the same time, I mean, priorities are switching. I’m not saying what pay-per-views are there. I’m saying everybody pays per view on the Peacock along with viewing 7 million other f*cking things. It’s not that, this is not the UFC, it’s not pro wrestling anymore. It’s not the big fight, the big match, we’re gonna pay $50 to see the two biggest stars in the world f*cking collide in this epic fight.”
“It’s FOX is paying us more than we’re probably getting from Peacock or from this part of Peacock or whatever the f*ck. Let’s see what we can do for the ratings. And it’s also when we can get John Cena. So in this case, yes, their rights are going to be renegotiated coming up, as everybody’s been talking about in the next year, year and a half. This is what it is now, network television.”
Cornette continued by talking about how he wishes other WWE shows had more stars on the shows.
“And I wish they would start treating the rest of Smackdown and maybe even goddamn Raw, like a pay-per-view, or network television, or we got to have some stars, we got to have a little more variety, we got to bring some big guns in, we got to have better matches and et cetera et cetera.”
“But as Cena and Owens against Zayn and Reigns. See it just, it almost even makes it, Zayn and Reigns. That’s gonna be a heck of a match because Owens’ and f*cking Sami’s d**ks are gonna be hard for weeks leading into that because they love working with each other more than they love breathing.”
“And Cena doesn’t want to embarrass himself, and Roman Reigns is the big dog, so that it’s gonna be f*cking good. And what will the story be coming out of it? So I think they’ve done good, they’ve done good for themselves there.”
As mentioned above, a big reason the match is likely happening on Smackdown is that it fits in with Cena’s schedule since he might have an off day on December 30th. Since John Cena lives in Tampa, it makes logical sense for him to appear on the show.
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