7 Completely Unnecessary Times WWE Keeps Kayfabe
Appreciate the dedication, but this is a bit much...
Keeping kayfabe has been a tradition in professional wrestling since its inception. The more realistic it looks, the better it looks. To keep it looking realistic, wrestlers would keep kayfabe, to the point where the fact that wrestling was scripted was a dirty little secret.
In the mid-1990s when the internet boom started, and the companies decided to stop insulting their fanbases intelligence and peel back the curtain a little, the dirty little secret wasn't so secret anymore.
After this revelation, kayfabe didn't die, it just changed. Promoters and wrestlers found new and unique ways to keep kayfabe in a world where everybody is in on it. Referees are supposed to throw up an X with their arms in matches when wrestlers are legitimately injured. Because most of the fans know about this practice, a referee may now throw up an X, and it's now a part of the storyline.
However, should kayfabe be kept when the show is over? At what point do the wrestlers stop being wrestlers and start being real people? Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels both admitted in their Rivalry DVD that they got so caught up in their work of trying to create realistic heat that they accidentally worked themselves into a shoot and couldn't stand each other. The lines between kayfabe and reality have been so blurred over the past 15-20 years, it's not crystal clear what's a work and what's a shoot anymore.
Specifically, there are seven places where the WWE and its wrestlers try to keep kayfabe thats completely unnecessary...
7. In WWE Studios Movies
Nowadays WWE Studios have become a company that mostly puts out direct-to-DVD movies to little fanfare but even films that make theatres like Dead Man Down are a joke. The main reason the movies aren't mainstream successes is because they aren't very good but an under-the-radar reason, particularly in movies featuring their superstars, is because the wrestlers who star in the movies are billed by their characters name, not by their real name.
On The Marine 4 poster, Summer Rae was billed as Summer Rae, rather than her real name, Danielle Moinet. For the 12 Rounds movie, the star of the movie is Dean Ambrose, not Jonathan Good. Other wrestlers like The Big Show, Brodus Clay, and Kane have been billed by their gimmick names in WWE Studios movies.
Now, there may be royalty payment reasons why the wrestlers are billed that way. Most likely, WWE Studios uses the gimmick names because that's the brand that the audience identifies with. Still though, it's implied that Jonathan Good is playing Dean Ambrose who is playing the lead of the new 12 Rounds movie, which makes no sense if you take a step back and look at it logically.
The wrestler is not doing the acting, the person is doing the acting! Interestingly enough, Triple H is billed as Paul Levesque Triple H on the cover of The Chaperone and Inside Out.