10 Biggest WWE Creative Mistakes Of 2020
4. The Reveal Of Erick Rowan's Spider
Don't put something in a box, get people excited/perversely curious about the contents of said box, if you have no idea about what, ultimately, to place inside of said box.
This storyline drew on the most baseline of human interest - "Alright, what's in the box, I only want to know because I don't know" - and went on for months. You knew it wasn't going to be anything good. This was an Erick Rowan storyline in WWE. But still: what was in the box?
The box, the box!
Clues were dropped along the way.
Erick Rowan made very creepy baby-babbling noises towards whatever it was, and those vignettes were filmed, inexplicably, from the POV of whatever it was. Imagine the real-life scene of poor Rowan staring into a camera, knowing damn well that that which was meant to curate his career was in actual fact the abyss that signalled its end.
It bit the hands of various curious jobbers. It caused Mojo Rawley to freak out in terror. It...
...was a comically oversized and patently fake animatronic spider for f*ck's f*cking sake.
Beyond how goofy and satirically Vince McMahon this business was, the optics of which were less than ideal, the "f*ck it" nature of the reveal further eroded faith in WWE's ability to do any sort of payoff, no matter how trivial.