What happens when one of the most popular performers of all time, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, decides to return to WWE on a near-full-time basis for the first time in years, but instead of doing a greatest hits tour, he makes it his personal goal to make Cody Rhodes bleed as much as possible?

Discussing what it's like to see one of his favorite wrestlers of all time turn into his personal bully in a special appearance on ESPN's First Take, Cody Rhodes explained that, while he still feels like The Rock is a legit Mount Rushmore-level star, his current actions are much more like “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan than the red and yellow superhero that main evented eight of the first nine WrestleManias.

“I think it's different than everyone anticipated. The Rock is a Mount Rushmore pro wrestler-sports entertainer. If you ask anybody ‘Who is your Mount Rushmore?' The Rock is on it,” Cody Rhodes told First Take via Fightful. “However, he came back, ‘I'll just step into the main event with Roman Reigns, me and my cousin, do this family thing.' I was so blessed that the fans did not want that. They wanted me to finish the story at WrestleMania 40. Because of that, the byproduct is the Final Boss Rock. The Final Boss, the only comparison I can make, in terms of watching him from the outside looking in, feels very Hollywood Hulk Hogan. It's a whole other layer. I don't want to say all positive things about The Rock, but I can tell you, that's the staying power. You turn this and make it into something incredibly unique and very special.”

Now technically, this isn't the first time fans have accused The Rock of “going Hollywood,” but even during his most heelish actions of the glory days of WWE, he was never cutting 20-minute, profanity-ladened promos or beating any of his opponents with a belt until they bleed as a special present for their mother. All things considered, this is more “Wrestling Machine” than “NWO” any day of the week.

Cody Rhodes never expected to lose his WrestleMania main event.

Discussing his initial WrestleMania 40 main event spot with Roman Reigns that was technically never agreed to when The Rock tried to take it from him on the MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani, Cody Rhodes revealed how it felt to see “The Great One” walk to the ring during his moment and effectively bully himself into the main event.

“After I had conceded the main event to The Rock, I still thought, ‘I'm going to find my way there.' I still thought that,” Cody Rhodes told Ariel Helwani via Fightful. “It's one of the reasons I stayed dead silent. I didn't want to put an opinion on it. I don't want to get into the backstage details. What was out there is what was out there. I just felt like I was still going to make it. Then, thankfully, literally millions of people made it so that I did get back.”

Asked what it was like to see the WWE fans effectively reject a dream match years in the making in order to lobby loudly for him to finish his story, Rhodes noted that while he tried to keep quiet at the time, he knew that in the end, he'd likely come out better of as a result.

“I just wanted to be quiet. In all the noise, I wanted to be quiet. It might be arrogance, and it might be me being naive; at that point, I felt like, ‘No, I've done everything.' I kept thinking something good is going to happen from this terrible situation,” Rhodes noted. “Something good is going to come of it. I talked to Diamond Dallas Page, and he said, ‘No matter what happens, it will be the best thing that has happened to you.' When you're a pessimistic like I am, and he's the most positive human being on the planet, you kind of want to be like, ‘Stop.' He wasn't wrong. Imagine had I not been in the WrestleMania 40 main event. The fire would still be burning. It would be completely out of control at this point. We didn't have to do that because Hunter heard it. He heard what was going on. That was something that was so loud, he had to hear it, and I was lucky to be in that spot.”

Did Triple H actually decide to shake things up because of what the fans chanted at shows and posted online? I mean, probably not, but hey, in the end, he got the match he wanted, The Rock hinted at a match he ultimately doesn't have to wrestle, and the WWE Universe is better off as a result.