10 Decisions That Helped Kill WWE Raw's Ratings
5. The John Cena Show
Given that WWE's business has been on a steady decline for so many years, it's hard to point to individual stars who have drawn money. Since The Rock's full-time tenure with the company has ended, John Cena is pretty much the only superstar really worthy of that title.
Cena's ubiquity has been a double-edged sword for the company. On the one hand, he's kept the company profitable during the post-Attitude age. On the other, he's also turned off some fans and has had difficulty drawing new ones. The amount of blame he deserves for that can be debated, but when it comes to the failure to make stars besides Cena, that fault lies solely with WWE.
Perhaps the most egregious example of just how much the company revolved around Cena from 2005 to 2015 came during his feud with The Nexus. The Wade Barrett-led group of rookies looked to be upending a very stale paradigm, but a crushing defeat at the hands of a Cena-led group of WWE stars at SummerSlam kept business as usual. Even worse, when the program continued, Cena was constantly pushed at Barrett's expense - at one point, he was fired in kayfabe, but still showed up on Raw every week.
Is it any wonder that nobody else got over? And can fans be blamed for slowly tuning out as they got more familiar with Cena's shtick?