Over his 20 years in the WWE Universe, Paul Heyman has seen an incredible number of wrestlers come into the promotion, learn how WWE does business, and either sink or swim based on their in-ring work, their booking, and, most importantly of all, their gimmick.
That's right, while some performers enter the promotion with a fully formed gimmick for one reason or another, be they established stars from another promotion like AJ Styles or CM Punk or a massive star from another medium like Logan Paul, Kurt Angle, or Ronda Rousey, others were assigned something that fit what WWE was looking for at the time, and sometimes had to go through multiple gimmicks until they found one that worked like Husky Harris or Festus.
Does that still happen now? Sure, Roxanne Perez, Cora Jade, Lexis King, and Axium all had to change their names and gimmicks to varying degrees when they jumped from their former homes to WWE, and the results have been varying degrees of good, but in the humble opinion of the “Wise Man” in an interview with NBC Sports Philadelphia, WWE has gotten a whole lot better under Paul “Triple H” Levesque, as he doesn't try to fit square pegs into round holes.
“For a long time, and this is something that Paul Levesque has truly addressed as the head of creative in WWE. For a long time, so many in this industry wanted the performers to conform to their vision instead of creative people looking at the performers and saying, ‘I can tap into that,'” Paul Heyman told NBC Sports Philadelphia via Fightful. “If you were right-handed and I'm envisioning your character as a leftie, then the way the business has been run for a while, I'd be sending you to the gym going, ‘You gotta work on your left hand,' instead of, ‘I can make this guy the best right-hander in the business' because that's what you are, a right-hander. Everyone in this business was trying to make characters and personas and people conformed to their vision instead of their vision being about what greatness the people themselves offered.”
What would have happened if Finn Balor was allowed to stay Prince Devitt, the original leader of the Bullet Club? Or how about if WWE decided to take away all of the AEW-isms of Cody Rhodes' current gimmick in the pursuit of making him fit better into what the promotion was looking for at the time? If Levesque was wise enough to lean into what current performers do well instead of trying to change them into something they might not be as good at, then he's already taken a massive step forward when compared to his predecessor.
Paul Heyman discusses the potential endings of The Bloodline.
Elsewhere on his WrestleMania 40 media tour, Paul Heyman stopped by The Ringer to talk all things The Bloodline, including how the current storyline, which has been going on for the better part of four years, will come to an end.
While it's safe to say no one, not even Heyman, expected this level of legendary push when Roman Reigns unseated The Fiend in 2020, the ending of The Bloodline's story has been rewritten multiple times, as it just keeps developing with each passing milestone.
“I'm a huge proponent of writing the last page of the script first. It's always to the advantage of long-term storytelling. I don't think it was ever done better, ever, than the Brian De Palma–directed movie Carlito's Way, because the very first frame of the movie tells you the ending. The first scene in that movie is the end of the movie. Then you're taken on a ride with these characters that are so layered. The audience is truly emotionally invested in them to such a degree that when you know the movie is coming to the conclusion, you have forgotten what the ending is, and you're rooting for Carlito, even though you were just told less than two hours ago he's going to die on that train platform at the hands of this person in front of his soon-to-be bride. The magnificence of that storytelling is, to this day, so dramatically underappreciated. I've always been of the belief that the launch of the story is the first push toward the conclusion. The finish is everything,” Paul Heyman told The Ringer via Fightful.
“All that being said. I think I would suggest the ending of this story has already been rewritten multiple times because the world has changed since the inception of the Bloodline story. Therefore, what was a clear vision of how this should play out almost four years ago changed along the way based on not only the audience's investment in the characters and the stories but the world itself—society itself, pop culture itself, sports culture itself has all changed, and now we can see the trajectory that we've been on takes us so much further than we ever initially imagined.”
How will The Bloodline end? Will Reigns drop his titles at WrestleMania 40 and see his family's story end like the end of The Sopranos? Or will this become a franchise like Friday The 13th, where someone like Solo Sikoa takes up the mantel of “Tribal Chief” – think Friday the 13th: A New Beginning – after his cousin has a Freddy Versus Jason-style throwdown with Roman Reigns? Either way, it's safe to say Heyman is going along for the ride, no matter how it shakes out, as at this point, his Hall of Fame legacy is set.
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