10 Best Gimmick Changes in Wrestling History

Arguably the most contentious entry on this list, Matt Hardy had a Hall of Fame-worthy career in WWE before he left the company in 2010, with multiple Tag Team Championship reigns and a handful of singles titles to his name. However, many consider his best work to be the ‘Broken’ character, and subsequent universe, that he created in 2016.

During his run in TNA, Matt Hardy changed his persona, attacking his brother and sporting a bizarre new accent. He became obsessed with “deleting” Jeff Hardy (whom he began to refer to as ‘Brother Nero’) and in July 2016, the pair competed in the now-infamous Final Deletion match at the Hardy Compound. This match was, for many, the first exposure to the ‘Broken’ character that Hardy had developed and it gained mainstream attention from wrestling fans around the world.

This run as ‘Broken’ Matt Hardy was undoubtedly one of the most iconic periods of his career, although WWE’s watered-down ‘Woken’ version of the gimmick did some damage to its reputation. All-in-all, though, the character and its wider repercussions for the wrestling world as a whole will go down in history as one of the most influential: the ‘Final Deletion’ concept paved the way for the cinematic matches that we saw throughout 2020 and beyond. 

For that reason, this has to be regarded as a masterstroke on Hardy’s part.