Planet Kayfabe: WWE SummerSlam 2025 Thoughts

Planet Kayfabe: SummerSlam Aftermath
By: “KCA” Paul Matthews
August 4, 2025

@PlanetKayfabe

Summerslam 2025 has ended and right before WWE goes into a cave to hide during football season, they went out with a bang. It was the first Summerslam to take place on two nights over the course of a weekend, like how Wrestlemania is now, and I have some thoughts about and more. Let’s get into it.

Summerslam does not need to be two nights:

As it is, I barely tolerate Wrestlemania as a two-night event. I’d prefer one, but I can accept two in its current format. Its their biggest show of the year, and the company is bigger than ever and employs more talent than ever before — why not. Sure. Make it two nights. Have dual main events. Have live music performances. Make it a party. Great. However, this year I think WWE proved that even their second-biggest event is not big enough to stretch throughout a weekend.

If I have to give night one a letter grade, I’d give it a low C. Night two, I’d give an A. This year, night one pretty much acted as the prelim show with a legitimate main event world title match between CM Punk and Gunther. Every other match felt like something that could have easily been on Saturday Night’s Main Event or a special episode of Raw or Smackdown. Jelly Roll had a fun appearance, but he did remind us that not every celebrity belongs in the ring. He was slow, not just in his moves but in his reactions. He didn’t conceal his spots that well. Like when Logan went for that big dive, the signature spot of the match, what I remember before that is Jelly Roll adjusting to get in the right spot and then covering his cock the whole time to make sure he doesn’t take a knee there. However, what Jelly Roll lacked in ring skill and awareness HOLY SHIT did he make up for in charisma and facial expressions. He got this crowd to react more with one determined look to his opponent and selling agony every time he was hit than any modern wrestler gets doing their constant flips and dives. This crowd was behind Jelly Roll. They were cheering him on. They were chanting his name. They were cheering for him to make a comeback. THAT is the reaction you want. Not “this is awesome” after going through a table. Not chanting the name of the fucking promotion after two guys nearly kill each other diving to the outside. Jelly Roll told his story with his body language and his face, and it got a response that 95% of today’s wrestlers in any promotion could dream of. I’m serious, they should show THAT at the performance center. It’s not all about moves and spots. Its the story you tell. There’s a difference between the video game generation that likes to do moves and actual workers.

As night one acted as a glorified prelim event, night two delivered from start to finish. Every match was good to great(except Becky and Lyra). I’ll get into some of the matches more, but my main point of this portion of this piece is to say that Summerslam and no other non-Wrestlemania WWE event needs to be two days long. I’m sure this will be the norm going forward, as WWE with an abundance of PLE’s and SNME’s and Take Overs and Evolutions and whatevers are valuing quanitity over quality. They are like a big YouTube channel or streaming service that just wants content. Content. Content. Content. That’s what its all about. Just do shows. This company as it is right now is not going to look at Summerslam this year and say “well, we tried it, but this would be better if we trimmed the fat and just put on one great show”. No. They are gonna say, we sold 55,000 tickets on night one and 60,000 tickets on night two. Give it ten years and the Royal Rumble, Money in the Bank, and possibly Survivor Series will all be split over two days. Maybe not all in stadiums just yet, but what’s stopping them from doing two nights on all the PLE’s? Nothing if you’re gonna buy it. However, if this SummerSlam is any indication, they didn’t do a great job selling “night one” of any future non-Wrestlemania shows. Yeah you got a celebrity appearance and a true main event. Otherwise, it was Raw outdoors.

Seth’s injury was a work. Remember where you saw it first:

Not much to say here. Just a little victory lap for the record. Follow me @PlanetKayfabe. I told you Seth’s injury was a work right after SNME when he was carted out. No one reacts that way to a real sports injury and LA Knight himself didn’t look thrown off. I was surprised how much people fell for this. It looked like an angle to me the whole time. What further cemented it as a work to me was when Triple H said the results were “inconclusive” the next day at Evoltion. That was too bad because they had people with that angle. Of course after last night everyone is saying they knew it was a work all along, but if you were on social media after SNME, you know most fans and even podcasters were acting like Seth was really injured.

I know Triple H doesn’t follow real sports, but I do, and injuries happen all the time and big or small, the news is out that night or the next day as to what the extent of the injury is. If Patrick Mahomes went down and the team said the results were “inconclusive,” there would be a massive shit storm from fans or the league would think the Kansas City Chiefs were bullshit and hiding something from the fans. Actually, they have reason to since the past two seasons, Mahomes has faked injuries to gain some sort of competitive edge or throw people off. Regardless of who, you never hear that. What WWE should have done is just say Seth said he tore his ACL and show some fake x-rays and say “he’s likely to miss 9 months to a year”. Bam. Its that simple. Everyone bit on him being carted out at SNME and you do NOTHING to sell this worked injury? NOTHING? How much effort does it take to snap a few pictures of Seth in a hospital bed? The more time went on the more it became clear it was a work.

But… just remember, long before everyone caught on, I said the next day after Evolution that Seth would cash in at SummerSlam. They don’t keep me on this website just because I’m pretty, people.  😉

Thanks for ending Cena’s turn and NOT turning Cody:

I’ve already written about the failings of Cena’s turn. It’s at the point where I wish it had never happened. It just seems like such a waste in his final year in the company. A nonsensical turn that no one really wanted anymore and that ripped off younger fans of having a true view into prime John Cena for if not the first time, the final time like it is for everyone else. I’ve used the Hulk Hogan comparison. I wasn’t around when Hogan was on top in the 80s. I was 14 when he came to WWF in 2002. Fans were ready for another run of Real American, red-and-yellow Hulk Hogan and we got it and it was great. Now imagine if instead he just came out and shit on the fans. 14 year old me would have been over his return instantly, and fans 10 or 20 years older than me would have refused to boo Hogan and that’s exactly what happened with John Cena. You can’t force this stuff. It was too late and much like ending Undertaker’s streak, yeah, we all talked about it and yeah it sounds like a cool idea when you say it out loud but it just doesn’t work. I feel like Cena’s heel turn in 2025 will go down like Sgt. Slaughter’s turn as the Iraqi sympathizer. Those who saw it know about it, but WWE will never talk about it or mention it again. When you see clips of Cena shown 10 years from now, they aren’t going to show the “you get nothing” promos he did. That’s right. Sarge, Jim Ross and now Cena. All heel turns that will be lost in time and good riddance. This shit sucked and it didn’t help that it was all about The Rock and then The Rock just disappeared and hasn’t been seen since Cena turned.

I watched WWE Unreal and they take great pride in fooling the fans and keeping everything secret. That’s fine. They did a whole episode almost entirely on Cena’s turn and it was Triple H, Bruce Prichard and a few other writers all jerking eachother off about how they managed to pull this off without it leaking. The most important thing to them was it did not leak. There was no “what are we going to do next” discussion AT ALL and it showed. They kept it a secret. They created a big moment…. and that was it. A moment. After that, Cena literally cut the same exact promo two weeks in a row. The Rock stopped being mentioned and was never seen. Now he’s babyface again. Good. Let’s just move forward.

There have been murmurings of Cody Rhodes turning heel and I’m glad he didn’t. The business needs more true babyfaces and true heels as well. Another failing of WWE right now is how they have all these fucking tweeners and it sucks. Tweeners don’t get real heat. Babyfaces and heels do. Tweeners are just there. If you have a bunch of tweeners its a sign of either lazy booking or the talent being marks for themselves because they wanna play cool heels yet be loved at the same time.

People are making a big deal about Cody getting booed at SummerSlam. It means nothing. He got booed at Wrestlemania too and that was it. He was never booed again. Also, not all boos are created equal. There’s no shame in Cody getting booed against the biggest babyface WWE has had in the past 20 years, that is a legendary figure, on a retirement tour, having a match in that town and at that event for the last time and that people are happy to see babyface again. On top of that, just getting boos isn’t bad. No one was saying “Cody sucks” or doing the more visceral chants like “fuck you [name]” or “please retire” or anything that is a sign that the fans have truly turned on someone or don’t like them. They weren’t really booing Cody in this case. They were booing John Cena’s opponent, who happened to be Cody Rhodes. I admire the discipline and resisting the urge to turn him heel. Don’t do it, WWE. Cody’s fine.

Thank you again for reading Planet Kayfabe. Follow me over on Twitter/X @PlanetKayfabe

I thought Summerslam (night two) was great and night one was below average. Cody Rhodes vs John Cena was an incredible main event and I know it takes two to tango, but it’s time to talk about Cody up there with some of the best main event wrestlers in WWE history after his match with Roman Reigns being one of the best in Wrestlemania history and now this one with Cena being one of the best in SummerSlam history.

Brock Lesnar also returned. I don’t have too much to say about that yet. Obiously it was a big moment and it already has millions of views on YouTube, but he came out after being away for 2 years, got a massive reaction and laid out John Cena with an F-5, so, obviously that’s where they’re going next and when they run their course together, I’ll have more to say. I’m for it. Should be fun.

Take care, everyone. That’s SummerSlam. Two nights. Ugh…. For NoDQ, I’m Paul Matthews.