The Rock-Roman Reigns-Cody Rhodes Segment Is The Most Disliked Video In WWE History!

It's never good news when there are numbers backing up how unpopular something is.

by Scott Carlson
WWE SmackDown The Rock Cody Rhodes Roman Reigns
WWE.com

As if WWE didn't need any more bad news about its debacle with Roman Reigns taking Cody Rhodes' WrestleMania XL main event spot against Roman Reigns, the backlash has measurably reached historic levels of unpopularity.

Fans online have been incredibly vocal about their frustration and anger about the decision to have Cody effectively step aside during the closing segment on SmackDown Friday night, ceding the path to Reigns to The Rock, who came out for a staredown to end the program.

A video of the full segment uploaded to WWE's YouTube channel has set an unfortunate record, becoming the most disliked video in the company's 17-year history on the site out of nearly 74,000 videos. The 19-minute video garnered a whopping 450,000 downvotes, against 92,000 likes in just 24 hours.

Advertisement

Both Fightful and ITR Wrestling noted that the video set the record in less than 12 hours, surpassing a 2013 video in which Randy Orton handcuffed Triple H and kissed an unconscious Stephanie McMahon. That video has amassed 200,000 dislikes (but also 1.4 million likes) during the past decade.

Advertisement

Friday's Rock-Roman-Cody video has more than doubled that total in just one day. It also blew past the wildly unpopular 2019 video of Charlotte Flair replacing Becky Lynch on the WrestleMania 35 card (32,000 likes, 82,000 dislikes).

Even if cynics dismiss some of the backlash as coming from a vocal minority, it's hard to ignore metrics like that, with the video likely surpassing a half-million dislikes by this morning. The question is whether this kind of backlash will manifest in other ways beyond online protests.

Advertisement

Already, one video surfaced from a WWE house show in Knoxville, Tennessee. During the event, they showed the SmackDown segment, and several fans let loose.

If this carries over to televised shows, WWE could be in for a bumpy road.

Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.