So can we stop this whole “Cena drove fans away” thing?

[EoE: Well There's Your Problem]

Aug 18, 2021 11:21:28 GMT -5 Teemu said:

Aug 18, 2021 11:05:00 GMT -5 polarbearpete said:

Just looking at Raw’s ratings, here are the average ratings through his run on top:

2004: 3.67
2005: 3.81
2006: 3.90
2007: 3.61
2008: 3.27
2009: 3.57
2010: 3.28
2011: 3.21
2012: 3.00
2013: 3.01

So, in 2005 he drew over 2004. And the boost grew into 2006. In 2007 there’s a dip, some of it can be due to Benoit; I know I stopped watching regularly after that. In 2008, Cena wasn’t really on top, he took a backseat, at least in the title picture, and he got injured. 2008 on RAW was about the Jericho and Michaels thing, and Punk, I think. In 2009, Cena was once again more heavily featured, I think - although I can’t comment because the guest host stuff drove me away for at least half a year. I have also no idea what happened in 2010 post-Mania, and that’s where my memories get kinda muddled anyway.

Cena was world champion, going on to run Batista out of the territory... And then after that it was The Nexus for the rest of the year.

[Deleted]

Aug 18, 2021 11:26:47 GMT -5 EoE: Well There's Your Problem said:

Aug 18, 2021 11:21:28 GMT -5 Teemu said:

So, in 2005 he drew over 2004. And the boost grew into 2006. In 2007 there’s a dip, some of it can be due to Benoit; I know I stopped watching regularly after that. In 2008, Cena wasn’t really on top, he took a backseat, at least in the title picture, and he got injured. 2008 on RAW was about the Jericho and Michaels thing, and Punk, I think. In 2009, Cena was once again more heavily featured, I think - although I can’t comment because the guest host stuff drove me away for at least half a year. I have also no idea what happened in 2010 post-Mania, and that’s where my memories get kinda muddled anyway.

Cena was world champion, going on to run Batista out of the territory... And then after that it was The Nexus for the rest of the year.

Oh yea, 2010 was The Nexus! I didn’t watch much of that, but I believe Cena has since then come forward and said that beating Nexus at SummerSlam was his call. So that’s on Cena, and I really think it was a mistake - even if I didn’t watch, just the idea of beating your hot new heel stable from the get-go is just bad.

[EoE: Well There's Your Problem]

Aug 18, 2021 11:29:34 GMT -5 Teemu said:

Aug 18, 2021 11:26:47 GMT -5 EoE: Well There's Your Problem said:

Cena was world champion, going on to run Batista out of the territory... And then after that it was The Nexus for the rest of the year.

Oh yea, 2010 was The Nexus! I didn’t watch much of that, but I believe Cena has since then come forward and said that beating Nexus at SummerSlam was his call. So that’s on Cena, and I really think it was a mistake - even if I didn’t watch, just the idea of beating your hot new heel stable from the get-go is just bad.

It’s probably the one thing held against him the most, out of everything in his career, probably because it’s on record that he pulled rank and got the result changed (as much as he supposedly regretted doing so later).

[Deleted]

Aug 18, 2021 11:32:24 GMT -5 EoE: Well There's Your Problem said:

Aug 18, 2021 11:29:34 GMT -5 Teemu said:

Oh yea, 2010 was The Nexus! I didn’t watch much of that, but I believe Cena has since then come forward and said that beating Nexus at SummerSlam was his call. So that’s on Cena, and I really think it was a mistake - even if I didn’t watch, just the idea of beating your hot new heel stable from the get-go is just bad.

It’s probably the one thing held against him the most, out of everything in his career, probably because it’s on record that he pulled rank and got the result changed (as much as he supposedly regretted doing so later).

I’ve thought there were two great storytelling opportunities to take Cena’s character to a new direction.

One was having Nexus utterly destroy him.

And the other was after his loss to The Rock, and what should have been a loss to and utter destruction by Brock Lesnar.

Interesting things could have been done, and even as a Cena fan, I am disappointed the direction with Cena’s character both times was just ”lol jk!”

[Dub H]

Aug 18, 2021 6:09:54 GMT -5 "Evil Brood" Jackson Vanik said:

It can both be true that Cena (and his booking more specifically) pushed a chunk of fans away from the product and that Cena was a draw for a lot of other fans and WWE hasn't been able to replicate his success since he went part time.

thats the way I see it at very least.

It of course wanst mainly Cenas fault,but his period as the face of WWE lost a lot of fans over time. Probably says more about WWE than anything.

[carp (SPC, Itoh Respect Army)]

Eh, I don't thinkthere's any way to know how much Cena personally hurt or helped, with all the other factors involved. Someone was gonna be the new Rock, and they chose him. Everything annoying about his booking is true of all the top faces they've ever had... the difference with Cena is just he was on top for much longer.

But the main thing, I think, is Cena was where the company really started being openly hostile to its own fans, and the fans really started resenting that they couldn't control the booking like they wanted. He would get booed out of the building half the time, and the WWE just ignored it except for a few cutting comments about how incorrect the booers were. That started the ball rolling to things like the hilarious first attempt to make Reigns a star. I think it's even had a hand in the recent revelation that McMahon and others clearly do not care at all about fan goodwill, to the point they'll fire a million people during a pandemic.

[canceled4truth]

Aug 18, 2021 4:53:49 GMT -5 eJm said:

For the record, I’ve always argued Cena was the reason ratings kept how they did for a long time because he was enough of a star to keep those watching. Especially with how ratings were slowly dropping from 2001 onwards (Smackdown was doing pretty well during the Smackdown 6 era but management didn’t like Smackdown beating Raw which…why? But whatever) and at the very least, there was an actual non Austin/Taker/HHH guy on top of the card who wasn’t a blast from the past or whatever.

What was the thing that drove away fans? The Authority. And that can be proven factually. The show went from doing 4s to 2s in two years which is complete lunacy to even comprehend. The fact they never even did much about it is even harder to comprehend especially considering in 2001, they were plugging the ratings holes with “LOOK! WE’RE DOING A TLC MATCH ON NATIONAL TV, YOU LOVE THOSE!” and such.

For what it's worth, this is literally what happened with me, as someone who only just now got back into wrestling because of Dark Side of the Ring/Peacock. That + Brock as absentee champion really turned me off from the product for a while. (I started watching in 2010.)

IMO, Cena is more of a symptom of the WWE's rating decline than the cause itself. With the double whammy of Benoit and no viable competition — and with WWE being a public company, after all — they played it safe, possibly at the behest of shareholders, and made a more family-friendly product. That means a smiling, straight-laced babyface will have to be your top guy. And, to be frank, WWE did succeed in making Cena a household name; they just did that at the expense of building more stars, and (seemingly) lost more adult male fans than they gained women and children over the process. Same thing with Roman; Cena's just remembered more fondly now because he is straight-up a better actor and wrestler, with the added benefit of rose-colored glasses.

[HMARK Center]

Aug 18, 2021 12:01:50 GMT -5 carp (SPC, Itoh Respect Army) said:

Eh, I don't thinkthere's any way to know how much Cena personally hurt or helped, with all the other factors involved. Someone was gonna be the new Rock, and they chose him. Everything annoying about his booking is true of all the top faces they've ever had... the difference with Cena is just he was on top for much longer.

But the main thing, I think, is Cena was where the company really started being openly hostile to its own fans, and the fans really started resenting that they couldn't control the booking like they wanted. He would get booed out of the building half the time, and the WWE just ignored it except for a few cutting comments about how incorrect the booers were. That started the ball rolling to things like the hilarious first attempt to make Reigns a star. I think it's even had a hand in the recent revelation that McMahon and others clearly do not care at all about fan goodwill, to the point they'll fire a million people during a pandemic.

Yeah, the issues that have cropped up over the last fifteen years or so aren't any one wrestler's fault, or even any set of wrestlers; it's been a process stemming from Vince himself and working down into the show's writing/booking/production/PR/etc., and whether Cena's been around or not the bad habits and trends have continued.

I've said this before, but one of my criticisms of Cena over the years has less to do with anything in particular about him as a performer and a lot more to do with how WWE has booked him and the entire promotion since he started his run at the top. I've never been huge on Cena's ring style (though he clearly got better over time and knows full well what he's doing in there to get reactions from crowds), but my big problem has been that I always felt like too much of the narrative drama from a lot of his biggest matches has been meta in nature, and it stems from the "contempt for the audience" factor you're mentioning, as they've deployed Cena as a stand in for "the WWE status quo".

John Cena the man and John Cena the character are one thing; what I've been annoyed by is John Cena the meta symbol for "all the booking we do that you don't like", which is a position he should never have been put in. So much of the passion people felt for his matches with Edge, Punk, RVD, etc., seemed to come less from the fans feeling invested in the on-screen story being told and more from the feeling of "my continued enjoyment of this promotion will be impacted by the outcome of this match", which is not a good way to watch pro wrestling, yet was often what they threw Cena out there to symbolize in spite of the fact that they were booking him as a babyface while simultaneously always booking the promotion itself as a heel!

Long story short: I don't believe that Cena as a man or as a character drove many people away, but I agree that the way he's been deployed over the years by the writers/Vince has been symptomatic of the larger creative rot that's been eating at WWE for years, even before Cena sniffed a world title. Combine it with Cena spending over a decade on top, almost as long as Hogan and Austin/Rock combined during an era where overexposure was a lot easier to fall into than the 80s-90s, and people end up with strong opinions about it.

[King Devitt]

Was Cena a draw? Yes.

Was he important to the company during a REALLY tough time in wrestling? Yes.

Was he also incredibly boring, and poorly written by Vince? Yes.

Did he eventually make me stop watching WWE? Yes.

I understand your Cena adoration, and have even been private messaged about it for some reason, but both things can exist.

He can be both the angel and devil on the shoulders of professional wrestling.

For some of us the bad far outweighs the good.

[The Dark Order Inferno]

Triple H and the endless McMahon family drama drove fans away, Orton and Batista did not perform as hoped, Cena was the one who stemmed the bleeding.

[Deleted]

Dude, I get it.  You're a Cena mark, and you hate seeing your guy being besmirched, which means you feel like you're being assaulted on a personal level.

But facts are facts.  The company took a guy who was over in 2005, made him a corporate sponge, and effectively made him very uncool.  The company also took virtually every act from then on out that got over by the audience and fed them to him in an effort to both punish the crowd for liking anyone besides Cena but also hoping their popularity would rub off on Cena.  It caused people to lose interest in the product that hadn't already tuned out from WCW being sold as it showed them that what they cared for didn't matter; it was what the company cared for that mattered.

That said, complaining about it doesn't solve anything since you're on the side that always won.  Imagine what it was like being on the side that had to put up with the bullshit, alright?  Whenever somebody immediately became popular with the crowd or was getting a push, it became a matter of "when" not "if" they would lose to John Cena, and that would be the end of their run.

[Starshine]

Cena was a band-aid covering an ever growing leak. He helped slow the flow, but was never going to fix the problems. As off putting as he could be on the show, he was balancing the outgoing fans by drawing new ones to take their spot. It's not the best situation, but it's not like anyone else at the time could do better.

I blame Triple H more than any other performer for the declines. The guy has and had a seat in the creative room so I don't give him the benefit of doubt that his hands were tied in terms of the quality of script and stories he worked with. You look at the true start of the decline in interest in the WWE and it coincides with his push as the headlining act, fans weren't having any of his shit. Once he took a backseat and Cena and Batista were given the spot things took an upswing again... until 2008 when he's back on top and ratings take another dip. No matter how WWE tries to spin this "legendary" career, fans as a whole do not give a shit about Trips.

[The Ichi]

I think it's usually a personal statement when people say it. I know people that stopped watching because of him, but I also know people that stopped watching because of The Rock in the early 2000s, and you can't argue his drawing power overall.

Cena is in no way responsible for the decline in viewers today though, and that's an absolutely laughable claim to make. Mostly since the decline largely happened AFTER he quit full time. And ratings have spiked since he's back again (from what I've heard, haven't been following).

HHH has done more harm for WWE than Cena ever has. He was responsible for two major ratings downturns, one in 2003 and another in 2014 onwards. The later is especially true; I can't imagine kids who were enjoying the fun baby-face being replaced by a group of heels in suits dominating.

[Deleted]

Aug 18, 2021 18:07:40 GMT -5 @jdogindy said:

That said, complaining about it doesn't solve anything since you're on the side that always won.  Imagine what it was like being on the side that had to put up with the bullshit, alright?  Whenever somebody immediately became popular with the crowd or was getting a push, it became a matter of "when" not "if" they would lose to John Cena, and that would be the end of their run.

I mean, most of those guys were heels. What did people expect was going to happen?

And him being a Cena fan probably meant he had to deal with people calling him all sorts of vile names, just like a bunch of other Cena fans.

Hell, people did that to Clash here. They tried to bait him in threads and mocked him. I should have just told them to f*** off for harassing him.

[Deleted]

Uh, no?

He did drive fans away. Someone liking him doesn’t mean other people have to stop knowing the facts at all.

[Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]]

I mean Cena factually did drive some fans away. But it was also a combination of a ton of other things. To the point you can see even without Cena there... the ratings have just tanked into the toilet repeatedly.

The way they booked Cena over everyone else drove fans off. When they tried to duplicate it with Roman? People had enough. When they overpushed Brock and had him kill Kofi? I think people also had enough. The entire Authority run? I think people had enough then too and tuned out. When CM Punk left and went on his rant about WWE? I think THAT drove a lot of fans away from the product or made some stick around to spite them.

It can be true that Cena drove people away. And imo it is. When you're on top and that damn near unstoppable for that long? You're gonna have people fed up with it who nope out... but it's also true that if you blame JUST John Cena for WWE's decline... you are overlooking literal blood money Saudi Arabia deals and moments like "We're so sorry! You are the Authority now! Just kidding nothing's changing LOL!" that have just as much stake in that claim as anything else for the sinking ship.

[The Ichi]

Aug 19, 2021 0:28:47 GMT -5 UN PLOMBIER NIGHTMARE #blm said:

Uh, no?

He did drive fans away. Someone liking him doesn’t mean other people have to stop knowing the facts at all.

Again, OP is talking large scale rather than personal cases. Cena brought in so many younger viewers that business strived under his run based on that alone. He wasn't "boom period" big, but he statistically brought in way more than he drove away, as evidenced by people tuning in again to see him feud with the failed attempt at replacing him.

[Pooh Carlson]

Aug 18, 2021 11:05:00 GMT -5 polarbearpete said:

Just looking at Raw’s ratings, here are the average ratings through his run on top:

2004: 3.67
2005: 3.81
2006: 3.90
2007: 3.61
2008: 3.27
2009: 3.57
2010: 3.28
2011: 3.21
2012: 3.00
2013: 3.01

I see that decline having more to do with the rise in cord cutting, Netflix and other streaming, and DVR.

[Can you afford to pay me, Gah]

Aug 18, 2021 3:26:59 GMT -5 Clash, Never a Meter Maid said:

Because I’m seeing it pop up in other wrestling forums and YouTube comments, not just here. And it’s based off of literally no evidence, aside from a small handful of fans who just didn’t find him appealing. And that’s going to happen with any top wrestler. (It’s either that, or they’re Austin fans who are really upset about not having Attitude back).

If you stopped watching because you couldn’t stand Cena, I’m sorry, but you’re in a minority. You guys didn’t exactly turn the tide enough for him to be a failure as an big time attraction. A wrestler who’s truly eroding a business isn’t going to reach the levels of fame he has. If he was as bad as some of his detractors say, WWE would have no merchandise sales to justify sustaining that push and they’d have pulled the plug years ago.

Can’t we at least say that in the long term, John has been far better for WWE’s bottom line than whatever they were trying with Hassan and that terrorist ring? Was he somehow worse than what Russo did to TNA? The Benoit fiasco? The overall evolving landscape of cable, and viewers just cutting the cord? If anything, I think he’s helped keep the company afloat during some of their issues over time. But the way some fans talk, they act like it’s still 2007 when he was so dominant (which was fun as hell, BTW).

Dunno, I still don’t think he’s ever gotten the credit he deserves there. I don’t care about however Vince wants to position him over the other talent, I’m just talking about him as a performer/draw.

What you failing to understand is YES he did draw away fans, a lot of the older generation stop watching because of him. It was more that way when Punk while champion had to play second fettle to him WHILE champion and booked Punk to the point of driving him away from the WWE and wrestling because after a long title run all it ended up was a long term setup for Cena vs. Rock for the title. However he a new generation of fans loved him. That why the Merchandise sold because kids loved him and his bright colors. So in theory he did drive a generation of fans away but brought in new ones who now also some came back for him. But as they got older they lost interest because the overall WWE product as gotten boring. The WWE still dusting the older generation top guys and pushed them over the current or the ones fans got behind. Its only gotten worst since they now want to pipe in there own reactions to make the guys they want look good. Taking away the fun of why people go to the events. Instead allowing the fans to determine who should be the guy on top. They pick who THEY want on top and told the fans the screw off. Thats when the fans started leaving is when they took Cena who at one time fans LOVED him when he was the rapper. Once he turned into the cookie cutter babyface the older generation left. The decline became more and more when the the force feed people down our throughs and punished most of the guys the fans got behind. The "Yes" movement was the one and only time the fans got what they wanted and it didn't last, yes because of injuries but after that, they screwed over Bray Wyatt at every turn. They screwed Dean Ambrose and Dolph Zigger in 2014 into 2015 to force feed us Roman. They tried to force feed us Orton and Cena matches again. It was a lot of things they made those numbers go down and booking was a big part of it.

Yes Cena drove older fans away. Kids loved him. but those kids gotten older. WWE just lost all touch of what works anymore. IF WWE didn't have the history and started in 2002 like TNA, there business would been the same as TNA with all the mistakes they made.

[repomark]

Cena is extremely charismatic and clearly was the right choice to be top guy. The problem I think is more that the negative live audience reaction to Cena did not prompt any change in his alignment - and it marks the beginning of wwe stubbornly not listening to the crowd. That aspect is what led to Roman Reigns not turning heel for far longer than anyone could reasonably argue was justifiable.

So it wasn’t Cena himself that was the thing that drove people away, but WWE’s failure to respond to his rejection as a babyface from a large portion of the audience. That was the catalyst.