Nick Khan Makes Bizarre Claim About The Rock’s Role At WWE WrestleMania 40
Nick Khan recently commented on The Rock’s role at WWE WrestleMania 40.
After Cody Rhodes won the 2026 Royal Rumble, it looked like he was going to finally finish his story and dethrone Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 40. However, on an episode of SmackDown, the American Nightmare seemingly gave his spot to The Rock. Fans were finally going to witness Roman Reigns and The Rock in an epic dream match.
This caused a lot of backlash online since fans wanted to see Cody Rhodes dethrone Roman Reigns at the Showcase of Immortals. This resulted in Cody reclaiming his WrestleMania match against Roman Reigns. Therefore, this began his feud with The Rock and Roman. On Night One of WrestleMania 40, Cody and Seth Rollins teamed up against The Rock and Roman Reigns in a losing effort, while on Night Two, Cody dethroned The OTC to finish his story and win his first WWE Championship. During WWE’s WrestleMania 40: Behind The Curtain documentary, The Rock admitted that the fans forced the company to pivot from him facing Roman Reigns to Cody vs. Roman Reigns. However, Nick Khan states otherwise.
Nick Khan claims WWE never changed plans for WrestleMania 40
During an interview with the Sports Business Journal, which was recorded in April and published this week, Nick Khan claimed that it was always the plan for Cody Rhodes to dethrone Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 40, and the company never pivoted and changed plans.
“By the way, the plan was always how it ended up in Philly two years ago. Sometimes — it’s a pre-determined outcome in wrestling. You want to throw the fans off, you want to let things bake. And then boom, it ends up the way that we wanted it to end up. It never changed. That was just online rumors and gossip that we were changing — it never changed. We convinced Dwayne Johnson to come back. He’s on our board of directors. It was a tag team match. He’s about the same age I am, so two years ago let’s say he was 50. You know, he was obviously in phenomenal shape. He did everything that we asked of him and then some. But that was always the result we were looking for.”
Nick Khan further said that WWE has never pivoted storylines based on social media criticism. They make decisions based on ratings and revenue, according to him.
“We will never respond to social media criticism. Again if ratings are down, if revenue is down, if relevancy is down, it’s up to us.” [H/T 411mania.com]
Nick Khan’s claims are certainly bizarre because they are different from what The Rock stated in WWE’s documentary.
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