Select Answers: John Cena, Bianca Belair, AEW-WBD Clarification...AGAIN

Welcome to Select Answers, a short feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

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How do you feel John Cena's retirement tour has gone so far heading into his final few appearances? How has it been received internally at WWE or with Cena himself?

Pretty terribly. The turn angle was an all-time great turn. Then it would appear that The Rock left WWE, and more specifically John Cena high and dry. I loathe "all you people" heel promos, but I felt like if one person could do it, get away with it and make it good, it was John Cena. However, in short order, the promos and heel presentation was lazy, uninspired, and looked like it didn't have much of a plan. I feel bad for Cena having what should have been a career defining retirement run effectively sabotaged or booked poorly. People in WWE know it wasn't good, and largely believe that it was because of the creative changes that happened. That being said, I think that the Cody Rhodes vs. Cena match at Summerslam was one of Cena's best ever.

Any word on when Bianca Belair is coming back?

When the injury happened, WWE didn't think it was nearly as bad as it ended up being. When it was relayed to me the night of WrestleMania, it was presented like "Oh, she broke a finger, she'll be back soon." Now it's been five months, and WWE has been without one of their top stars. Bianca Belair's specific injury was a break at the joint on the Triple German suplex at WrestleMania. She initially thought she broke all of her fingers. It swelled up big time backstage, to the point to where people were coming to look at it. We hope she's back soon!

When WBD doesn’t have exclusivity with AEW anymore does that include streaming for the TV shows? Cord cutter News said you reported they were shopping the streaming rights

So, I'll clarify on this again. AEW and WBD have streaming and TV rights for Dynamite and Collision. AEW could negotiate with Fox or any other network and bring back Rampage, or launch Shockwave, or anything they want. If they wanted to, they could bring back AEW Dark to Youtube. The exclusivity came about in 2023 when they reached a deal for Collision to launch. This has nothing to do with mergers, or app changes, or anything.