What WWE Could Learn From the MCU

Introduction: With a lot of attention focused this week on WWE’s flagship show reaching all-time ratings lows, I started thinking about what WWE could do to improve their main roster programming, and I started thinking about how successful the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies have been, and the parallels between the two. Because of the shared universe, Marvel films are able to utilize episodic storytelling, not unlike WWE, professional wrestling and comic book movies are seen as more low-brow forms of entertainment (at least by others within the entertainment industry), both products are ostensibly geared towards younger fans with the occasional tip of the hat to long-time adult fans, and both WWE and Marvel are the most marketable brands in their respective media. With that in mind, I think WWE could follow some of Marvel’s practices and drastically improve what we see on television each week.

SPOILER WARNING: this column is going to contain at least minor spoilers for some Marvel films, so if you haven’t seen them and you don’t want to be spoiled, you have been warned. Considering the most recently released Marvel film debuted over three months ago, and I will not be talking about specific storyline details from it, I hope that no one is too offended.

This column starts with a single principle idea – professional wrestling and comic books share a common audience. To be certain, not all wrestling fans like comic books and not all comic book fans like professional wrestling; however, if you frequent sites dedicated to one or the other on the internet, there is quite a bit of overlap between the two groups. So with that in mind, why are WWE’s ratings at an all-time low while the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to surpass expectations, and what can WWE learn from the success of the MCU to improve their weekly product?

A Hero is Only as Good as Their Villains

One of the biggest complaints you will see about WWE’s programming over the past few years is that John Cena’s character is stale and that even when he loses the occasional match to a younger, up-and-coming heel, he ends up more than getting his win back and ends up dominating the rest of the feud and ensuring that his opponent never really gets over as a top performer. I have actually written about my views on WWE Creative and specifically how they book Cena at length in the past, so rather than rehash all of that, I will simply look at how WWE could make John Cena a more compelling character.

The way that Cena is currently booked draws frequent comparisons to Superman, in that a lot of the drama is removed from any fight because the hero is nigh-invulnerable, which leads to contrived situations where the hero takes the occasional loss. This is essentially true, but because Superman is not a part of the MCU, I am actually going to compare him to arguably the biggest star in the MCU, that being Tony Stark/Iron Man. Like Stark, Cena is frequently sarcastic and dismissive of his opponents, and both are confident to the point of cockiness in their own abilities. The latter trait tends to cause them to underestimate their opponents, which often leads to losses early in the story, but in the end, they tend to overcome whatever is thrown at them and ultimately triumph.

So if Stark and Cena are ultimately so similar, why is Stark one of the most popular characters in the MCU and Cena one of the most complained about (and loudly booed) in the WWE Universe? A lot of it has to do with what happens in the middle – where Stark is forced to at least temporarily acknowledge his shortcomings, frequently using sarcasm to cover his own feelings of inadequacy, Cena barely pays lip service to his opponents’ successes, if he even acknowledges them at all. Look back at what happened in each universe this spring – Tony’s hubris led to him convincing Bruce Banner to help him use an unfinished artificial intelligence matrix from a suspect source in hopes of cutting down the Avengers’ worldwide responsibilities, while Cena found himself challenged by NXT champion Kevin Owens for his United States championship. Both Ultron and Owens scored early victories over their adversaries, but where Tony had to face the prospect of his self-confidence potentially creating an extinction-level event and wiping out the human race, Cena simply no-sold Owens’ victory and told him that unless he beat him cleanly in the ring (mind you, this was THE NIGHT AFTER Owens had just beaten Cena cleanly in the ring), he was not a real man.

It ended up taking the entire Avengers team (along with Ultron’s former pawns the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver) to stop Ultron and his army of robotic bodies, but without Stark admitting that he needed their help (and a deus ex machina in the form of J.A.R.V.I.S.), Ultron almost certainly would have succeeded in his plans. Cena handily beat Owens in both of their subsequent live special matchups, which rather than making Owens seem like a legitimate threat to the established top star in the company instead made his initial victory look like a complete fluke. An even better example of this would be Cena’s feud with Bray Wyatt from last year, as Wyatt had his own Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in the form of Erick Rowan and Luke Harper, and even an army of creepy children. Cena single-handedly overcame them all, and even though Wyatt did win with the equivalent of a tiny singing Ultron body, Cena had already soundly embarrassed Ultron and the Maximoffs for the duration of that particular battle. Even Seth Rollins, who should be the comic book version of the Mandarin to Cena’s Iron Man, needed the assistance of a non-wrestling comedian (sorry, I’m at a loss as to who Jon Stewart would be in this analogy) just to escape with his WWE World Heavyweight Championship. If Cena and the booking team actually treating his opponents as realistic threats, how are fans supposed to do that? Ultimately, it makes any storyline involving Cena feel anticlimactic and keeps his opponents looking inferior, even when they are able to beat him cleanly like Owens did in their first match.

WWE Needs Their Own Guardians of the Galaxy

So if the best-known character in WWE’s universe routinely removes all drama from the storylines that he is involved in and ensures that no villains are seen as being on his level, at least the rest of the roster is allowed to look impressive, right? Sadly, that is not the case either, as outside of Cena, Brock Lesnar, and Seth Rollins, characters in WWE are largely stuck in a morass of traded wins and losses. Imagine if the second Thor movie and both Avengers films had just featured Loki and Thor (backed by the Chitauri and the Avengers, respectively, in the Avengers films) defeating one another with no real resolution. That would be bad enough, but then imagine if there were no movies featuring the Hulk, Captain America, Ant-Man, or the Guardians of the Galaxy, and all of the Iron Man movies were just ninety minutes of Iron Man emasculating whatever villains were thrown at him. Not exactly a very exciting prospect, is it?

Sure, people complain about the MCU movies being formulaic, and to an extent they are – hero is introduced (or reintroduced), loses an early battle or two, learns a lesson or some new knowledge, and then ultimately triumphs. But at least they each have something different to offer, and no film is more exemplary of that notion than James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Prior to its release, people were unsure of whether the film would be a success, but it currently stands as the fourth highest-grossing film in the MCU, and the highest-grossing film that doesn’t feature Iron Man. Not bad for a handful of characters that no one really knows about.

But Guardians of the Galaxy is only one of the films Marvel has released that featured lead characters that the general public knew little about. And while one could certainly make the argument that the first Iron Man fits that bill, I am going to focus on 2015’s Ant-Man, for the simple fact that the two films present drastically different approaches to how Marvel handled the films. In both cases, Marvel hired directors who were passionate about the films that they wanted to make, but whereas they let James Gunn make the version of Guardians of the Galaxy that he wanted to see, creative differences between Marvel Films and original Ant-Man writer/director Edgar Wright led to Wright’s departure from the film. And while Peyton Reed, Joe Cornish, and Adam McKay did an admirable job of replacing Wright on the film, I think a significant portion of the audience who watched the finished film wondered just how much differently Wright’s version would have been. Ant-Man currently sits at tenth on the all-time MCU box office rankings, and while I cannot say with any certainty that Wright’s version would have matched Guardians surprising box office performance, I do think that it could have moved up a few spots on the list.

So how does any of that tie into WWE’s booking practices? Think about it in terms of NXT debuts – rather than trusting a director with a passion for the subject matter (in this case, Triple H), Vince McMahon, Kevin Dunn, and the main roster creative team(s) seem to cut every NXT superstar off at the knees shortly after their debut. Some talents, like Bray Wyatt and Kevin Owens, enjoy a measure of success immediately after their debut; however, too often it seems like they get lost in the shuffle after their first feud (or get jobbed out to Iron Man), and it leaves them fighting an uphill battle for widespread acceptance. Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch, and, to a lesser degree, Charlotte, appear to be the latest victims of this trend, as only a few months after their debuts, they seem to have lost the majority of the momentum that they gained in NXT thanks to being stuck in a holding pattern of trios matches until Nikki Bella broke AJ Lee’s record for longest reign with the Divas Championship.

I think one of the biggest reasons that Guardians of the Galaxy was such a success for Marvel was because they trusted in Gunn to make the film that he wanted to make, and it resulted in the film with the widest departure from the somewhat standard tone of the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel was able to make a successful film with characters that the general public had never heard of because they gave their audience something significantly different and they trusted in a relatively unproven director’s vision. While it seem like there is little chance that Vince is going to cede control of the main roster to his son-in-law in the near future, WWE could at least give its fans something different. Instead of continuously giving us a steady diet of Iron Man, let a Starlord (Cesaro) or an Ant-Man (Dolph Ziggler) have a real chance at showing fans what they have to offer. After Ziggler’s performance at Survivor Series this past year, I thought that perhaps he was going to get his chance, but then he was randomly demoted to trading wins and losses with the other five or six guys in the Intercontinental Championship hunt for several months afterwards, and now he and Rusev (the Crimson Dynamo) are locked in an endless battle that never seems to get resolved, which is basically the equivalent of being in a non-X-Men 20th Century Fox Marvel film. And, as I have discussed before, the vast majority of heroes in the WWE Universe emulate that snarky, (wo)man-child attitude that Cena has employed for the better part of a decade.

I will give WWE credit – the closest thing they have to a Guardians of the Galaxy-type act right now are the New Day, and WWE has responded by giving them a decent amount of time on each show they appear on and a second reign with the tag team championships. Hopefully their current reign does not end with a 3D, especially after the apparently lack of reaction the Dudleys got at MSG (ostensibly one of their home arenas) on Saturday, as winning the feud over the Dudleys would do more to establish New Day than months of wins over the Primetime Players, Los Matadores, and the Lucha Dragons (I love two of those teams, but they have not been setting the world on fire lately).

Listen to Your Fans

This might be cheating; however, instead of comparing WWE to a Marvel Cinematic Universe film, I am instead going to look at their small-screen flagship, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. During season one, the biggest complaints levelled against MAoS were that its characters lacked depth, it felt disconnected from the films in the MCU, and that in a show set in a universe filled with superheroes, people with superpowers were largely absent. During the latter stretch of season one and the majority of season two, the show addressed all of those issues, turning seemingly rote characters like Ward and Skye into two of the more interesting characters on the show, laying the groundwork not only for one of the biggest surprises in Avengers: Age of Ultron but also for major plot points in Phase 3, and introducing an entire race of powered individuals, one of whom is a featured member of the team.

Contrast that with WWE, who have received the same complaints for the past several years – Cena is stale, new talent are routinely pushed aside in favor of the same handful of performers (many of whom are part-time at best), too much fifty-fifty booking in the midcard ensures that no one ever stands out from the rest of the pack – the list goes on, yet WWE seems intent on either flat-out ignoring these issues or dismissing them as the rantings of a select group of fans who represent nothing more than a vocal minority of their overall fanbase. With ratings on the decline yet again (and showing an overall decline since 2001, when WWE bought out any real competition that they had), it certainly seems like WWE should be paying more attention to any fans who are attempting to offer constructive criticism.

And while I realize that WWE are not known for listening to their fans (in truth, the general perception tends to veer more towards Vince having an unhealthy obsession with doing the opposite of whatever the fans want), perhaps this record low in ratings will cause them to look at other successful properties that appeal to a similar market and make adjustments accordingly.

Wyatt Beougher is a lifelong fan of professional wrestling who has been writing for 411 for over three years and currently hosts Fact or Fiction MMA and reviews Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.