12 Times WWE Brutally CANCELLED World Championship Reigns

10. Samoa Joe

Revisionist history paints AJ Styles' year-long WWE Title reign between November 2017 and 2018 as being among the era's most elite, but rewatch it, and you'll come to understand what is meant by revisionist history.

It's fine. Not exactly a smoking pile of crap, but not exactly groundbreaking either, this is the championship run that somehow featured both a critically underrated two-on-one defence against Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn at the Royal Rumble, and that feud where Shinsuke Nakamura developed a kink for thwacking folk in the willy.

Great.

It also featured a summer program between AJ and Samoa Joe that is genuinely worth revisiting, not least for the surprisingly high level of quality they were allowed to produce under Vince McMahon's leadership, but for the chilling scenes of Samoa Joe reading a bedtime story. He was hauntingly untouchable on the mic in 2018, at least as far as WWE is concerned, and he was so close to being rewarded with a WWE Championship reign as a result.

PWInsider reported after SummerSlam that WWE had considered having Joe depart the Barclays Center with a few pounds of extra baggage before opting for AJ to reign on. Joe still won the match, albeit via disqualification, and once he and AJ wrapped up their storyline, he never again came close to the industry's richest prize.