WWE WrestleMania 40: Cody Rhodes Teases “Real Plan” Would Have Made Fans “Even More Angry”

It was a rocky road to WWE WrestleMania 40 for Cody Rhodes. One week before WWE Royal Rumble, all signs pointed to Rhodes vs. Roman Reigns and CM Punk vs. Seth Rollins headlining both nights of the Showcase of the Immortals. Just hours before the Men’s Royal Rumble Match, Rhodes was told that he would not be challenging Reigns for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship anymore. Despite this, Rhodes was still scheduled to win the Royal Rumble, meaning he would still have a championship match at WWE WrestleMania 40. With then-WWE World Heavyweight Champion Seth Rollins preoccupied with Punk, who had not yet been injured when Rhodes’s plans had changed, Rhodes’s alternate WWE WrestleMania 40 future had virtually no options.

Cody Rhodes Teases His “Real Plan” at WrestleMania 40

The American Nightmare was almost more than a nickname this past April.

Speaking to Inside The Ropes, Cody Rhodes teased that the “real plan” WWE had for him at WWE WrestleMania 40 would have made fans “even more angry.”

“If people knew the real plan for me, they’d be even more angry,” Rhodes said. “I can’t share the real plan for you, The Rock plan, whatever it may be. That was going to be on my mind in terms of how do we make that work? How do we accomplish that?”

Going into WWE Royal Rumble, Rhodes was scheduled to win the match yet Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and CM Punk were pencilled in as the world title challengers at WWE WrestleMania 40. This would’ve meant that Rhodes would either save his Royal Rumble title shot for after WWE WrestleMania 40 or he would challenge a titleholder outside of the main roster’s world champions. 

He could have emulated Charlotte Flair, who won the 2020 Women’s Royal Rumble and challenged then-NXT Women’s Champion Rhea Ripley, by going after then-NXT Champion Ilja Dragunov, or he could have elected to go for either the WWE Intercontinental Title or the WWE United States Championship, which were held at the time by Gunther and Logan Paul, respectively.

“I had a really good team of people around me,” Rhodes continued. “That’s where DDP hit me with the famous ‘whatever happens to you will be the best thing that ever happens to you’ line, and he was right. Including if it had gone the other way, he would have been right because the audience was what mattered, and I got to be really quiet and I got to say nothing, I got to watch the fire grow and I realized maybe I had every right to be confident. Maybe I had every right to not be concerned.”