John Cena calls one of his 2025 heel promos in WWE “a pretty good failure”

During an interview with The Breakfast Club, WWE champion John Cena commented on his promo from the June 13th 2025 edition of SmackDown. In the segment, Cena laid out his calculated retirement plan while referring to himself as a genius and the greatest of all time. Cena was then interrupted by Cody Rhodes, Randy Orton, and LA Knight.

Here is what Cena had to say about the promo…

“I had a pretty good failure two weeks ago, I think. I was out in front of a live audience, not Grand Rapids, where were we — Lexington, Kentucky. I’d opened the show. I had five minutes to speak before three other performers came out and that’s a real hard spot to be in because I can’t do any action yet, you kind of got to tell people what my purpose is and my character is not someone to rile up the audience, it’s somebody against the audience. I took the route of, okay, evil mastermind, I’d like to explain my plan and I did for five minutes. I planned this, all this shit, I knew this would happen so I made this move, I knew this would happen. I thought it was well constructed, I thought it was dropping easter eggs for fans. They f*cking hated it. The great thing is, they loved when the next three guys came out, so the bit itself worked. But man, it was crickets. I know the noise. I really cannot wait for this to be over, I really thought this was going to work.’” (quote courtesy of Skylar Russell)