John Cena finally turned heel in WWE, but will it work?

Fans waited years, but will they get everything they wanted?

It finally happened. John Cena has become a heel. After spending the vast majority of his 24-year wrestling career as the symbolic and literal “face” of WWE, Cena shocked the world during Elimination Chamber on Saturday night by siding with The Rock and beating down champion Cody Rhodes to cement himself as the bad guy entering Wrestlemania.

The star-studdled angle also includes rapper Travis Scott, who is planned to be part of the bay guys in the lead up to the biggest show in professional wrestling.

A Cena turn is something wrestling fans have been clamoring for in over a decade. Now we’re left to wonder: Is this all going to be worth it, or is it too little too late to care about Cena in this way?

Travis Scott will decide the impact of John Cena’s heel turn — Jared Mueller

Cena’s heel turn is the biggest one since Hulk Hogan turned on WCW and created the NWO. That move and the formation of the NWO, along with Degeneration X in the WWE, created a boon for the wrestling business.

At the time, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash were still in their early prime of their careers and Hogan still was a draw. Today, The Rock is randomly involved when he wants to and his schedule allows and Cena is retiring from wrestling at the end of the year. The Rock, as a member of the Board of Directors of TKO (owners of WWE), will always be around but will not be as engaged as Hogan, Hall and Nash was during NWO’s rise in WCW.

From a wrestling perspective, Travis Scott didn’t make sense during this angle:

From a wrestling perspective, that meme is appropriate. We saw that when Scott hit Rhodes in the face in a way that doesn’t happen in professional wrestling:

While all of that is true from a pure wrestling perspective, the angle becoming anywhere near as big as the NWO will depend on Scott’s involvement.

In the world of Instagram reels, YouTube shorts and TikTok, Scott is a pop culture icon and is reportedly training to compete in the ring. Scott will help draw the casual fan to the sport with his involvement in the WWE’s biggest story and could help take it to another level.

Cena’s growing his popularity outside of wrestling while The Rock has been mostly out of the business for over a decade. Together, neither has the kind of impact to start another revolutionary moment in the wrestling business. Scott does.

Long-term, WWE not only needs Scott involved but also a younger wrestler to join the storyline on the heels’ side. For now, Cena’s heel turn is fun for wrestling fans but needs Scott and a lot of luck to come anywhere near the level of Hogan’s betrayal of WCW.

This isn’t the heel turn we needed — James Dator

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a good dramatic heel turn — but it being 47-year-old John Cena who is going to be a part-time performer at best, that’s just not it.

What this should have been is Cody Rhodes’ heel turn. It’s essentially been seven years since Rhodes was a heel when he was in Bullet Club in NJPW, and from that point on his entire time in both AEW and WWE has been as a clean cut, legacy babyface.

It’s not that I didn’t want to see Cena turn heel at some point, but if we saw everything flipped and Cody be the one to take out Cena — that would have been cataclysmic. Also it would have allowed the company to move forward in some really interesting ways with a heel as Universal Champion not named Roman Reigns.

Ultimately I think this will be a fun little bit of story in the lead up to Mania, and then after it’ll be forgotten. There was a time for a Cena turn, and it was a decade ago. Now we have a cheap facsimile of one.

This is the perfect heel turn to tell the major story that WWE is trying to — JP Acosta

In this new era of booking led by Paul “Triple H” Levesque, there’s always been a main theme at the top: how far can hate and desperation push you? Think about it, with all of the high profile feuds that have gotten the world’s attention–CM Punk vs. Drew McIntyre, Roman Reigns vs. Seth Rollins, Seth Rollins vs. CM Punk, Kevin Owens vs. Cody Rhodes, Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn. All of these rivalries have a common thread of hate and desperation for winning a title pushing a man to their absolute limit. Going back through every time John Cena has spoken, you can hear the desperation in his voice, signs of a heel turn incoming. Listen to his press conference after the Royal Rumble, which he lost to Jey Uso:

“I’ve been the first match, I’ve been the middle, I’ve shared beers with the fans. Because my truth, my perspective, is that I’ve always done what’s best for business…What is best for business is that I main event Wrestlemania, and what is best for business is that I confidently say that I’m going to win my 17th championship.”

That doesn’t sound like a guy who just wants to go out the way he came in! Since the Rumble loss, I thought that Cena would go on his version of the Shawn Michaels “do I still have it” style run to facing Cody at Wrestlemania, but seeing how this heel turn was executed, it makes sense for Cena to be the heel to Cody’s face, because Cena is the desperate one here. Cena is the one who needs that 17th title. Cena is the one who, as Bray Wyatt put it years ago, needs to be in the spotlight. Cody is the perfect foil for Cena and The Rock, the hero who does what those two men did before him. What I think happens from here is simple: Cena erases all of the heroism en route to beating Cody at Wrestlemania for his 17th title victory. Then you can get feuds with Randy Orton and CM Punk, before Cody wins the title back and retires Cena for good. In his final match, you could even execute a double turn, with Cody finally cracking and realizing that it’s lonely at the top, and we get Codelander ruling over the WWE.

However, in order to get to heel Cody, we need the one thing that’ll finally make him break–and Cena is the man to break him.