WWE’s WrestleMania 39 is still a little over a month away, but its headlining matches have already taken shape. Cody Rhodes will attempt to dethrone Roman Reigns of the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship, Bianca Belair will face Asuka with her year-long reign as Raw Women’s Champion on the line and Rhea Ripley will attempt to finally get revenge on SmackDown Women’s Champion Charlotte Flair for what happened back at WrestleMania 36 in 2020. However, reports from the past few months heavily indicate those matches underwent significant changes in recent months.ย
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Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful Select addressed all of that on Sunday with a new report. He started off by saying that Flair was originally supposed to move to Raw upon her return from hiatus, but those plans changed when Ronda Rousey’s booking was altered. This saw Flair return on the final SmackDown of 2022 and beat Rousey in an impromptu title match, positioning herself as a babyface. Rousey has since turned her attention to the women’s tag titlesย and will reportedly challenge for them at WrestleMania. He also noted that, despite heavy speculation, Ripley vs. Belair was never planned for this year’s WrestleMania. Despite being rivals in NXT and on the same brand, the two have yet to cross paths in a televised one-on-one match on WWE’s main roster.
WWE’s Plans Changed for WWE WrestleMania 39 Main Event
Sapp then turned his attention to the main event world championship program. He echoed a previous report made by WrestlingNews.co back in December, stating WWE wanted the world championships separated with one on Night One and the other on Night Two. Rhodes was always set to win the Royal Rumble, but the title matches were originally going to be TBA/Cody Rhodes vs. Roman Reigns for the Universal title and Rhodes/Drew McIntyre vs. Seth Rollins for the WWE Championship. However, McIntyre found success teaming with Sheamus, Rollins was moved into a program with Logan Paul and the titles are still unified and held by Reigns as of this writing.
The report made no mention of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who has been rumored for a WrestleMania match with Reigns for years. It’s possible that he could’ve been that “TBA” in the originally-planned Universal Championship match, but Paul Levesque was already downplaying that idea in the post-show press conference following January’s Royal Rumble.
