9 Ups & 11 Downs For WWE In 2025

7. AJ Lee's Return

A subjective delight and - more importantly - an objective success (the 99% certainty of her initial return drew one of the company's best houses of the year in Chicago), AJ Lee's carefully plotted comeback was a flash of the sort of inspiration that's been lost for much of the company's 2025.

The fact that so much of WWE's 2010s sucks has created a nostalgia vacuum of sorts - a mindest where it's simply easy to erase the period than poke back through it to find new things to lionise. AJ was one such example worth revisiting, as evidenced by the sustained pop the strains of her iconic entrance theme generated when she returned alongside husband CM Punk to help fend off Becky Lynch and Seth Rollins. A word on Lynch (before more come later) - her performances needling Punk to trigger Lee's return were best-in-class and the closest Punk came all year to being in a personal-issues-draw-money programme with anybody. The two were operating on a different level, but that level built a suitable stage the former Divas Champion to skip back on to.

There had been generations of fans that had presumably long written off any chance of her return, not least because Punk's was such an impossibility for so long, but the set-up and execution was beyond any best case scenario even they could have manifested, as proven in the Wrestlepalooza mixed tag match between the four. Comfortably the best and most heated thing on the show, the structure elongated it unnecessarily but nonetheless gave fans everything they could have wanted from an AJ Lee comeback in 2025, including a decisive finish that sent Lynch on a personal and professional downward spiral to aid her subsequent stories until Lee herself presumably comes for the Intercontinental Championship.

In times of panicked, lazy or outright bad booking up and down the shows, this was a hearty reminder that WWE's unexpected creative renaissance hadn't completely collapsed just yet.