When Vince McMahon retired from his duties in the summer of 2022, it effectively changed the WWE Universe forever.

Once the grand commander of all things WWE creative, with a well-documented pension for changing up entire cards on the same day as a show to bend the plans to his very unique, ever changing vision, McMahon's exit left many a performer scrambling to see where they fit into this new Fed, with some acts benifiting greatly and other struggling to keep their footing.

Discussing how this dynamic impacted his final faction in WWE, the Maximum Male Models with Steve Fall, Mason D. Madden, aka Mace, revealed that the exit of Mr. McMahon effectively marked the end of his faction, too, as it led to Max Dupri becoming LA Knight, Maxxine Dupri joining the Alpha Academy, and his contract being terminated alongside platonic life partner Mansoor.

“We go to SmackDown. I do a dark match and we talked to Vince. He explains, ‘Hey listen. You guys are two good-looking guys. I want you to do this male model thing, and if you commit to it, then it's really gonna work out for you'” Mace revealed. “We're like, ‘Great, we will commit to anything.' It was a very avant-garde presentation. I think the first couple of weeks, which was the only time I had been pushed in my entire life where they tell everybody to clear the ring. We need to work on these model segments. Money in the Bank was happening. It was like the go-home show for Money in the Bank, and there's Money in the Bank ladders all over the entranceway. Vince comes out, and he's like, ‘Get this crap out of here. We need to work on the Runway show.' Me and Manny looked at each other. We were like, ‘This is it. This is it for us'. Two weeks later, text message, ‘I'm retiring.'”

Now, to be fair, the MMM didn't exactly disband the day Vince McMahon retired, as Paul “Triple H” Levesque attempted to keep the group going with a few more minor angles, but after being a true favorite of the third-generation promoter, his son-in-law felt differently and ended push and eventually their employment as a result.

Mace explains why Vince McMahon dropped Retribution too.

Elsewhere in his conversation with Steve Fall, Mace was asked about his other SmackDown faction that was prematurely disbanded before it could see its true potential: Retribution.

While Vince McMahon and company clearly put a ton of effort into building up Retribution, as it turns out, it was Fox, not WWE Creative, who put the kibosh on the group because it was too similar to Antifa.

“As I understand it, we were meant to be Antifa. When FOX, because it was on SmackDown, found out that there was an Antifa angle on Smackdown on their FOX program,” Mace said via Wrestling Headlines. “They said, ‘Hey, stop.' So confusion happened. They were like, how do we pivot this because they had already dedicated a decent amount of time to this angle. And then they gave us supervillain masks. And I'm like, ‘Cool. Let's lean into being — I really wanted to be like, like Power Rangers. Yeah, I wanted to be Puddies…'we looked crazy, but like, I feel like there's a vibe for that.”

When Fall noted that he liked the group and was sad to see them break up, Madden thanked him, noting that it was a shame the group was never able to test their mettle in front of a live audience to gauge their reactions.

“Yeah, but they just, it never really got back on track. Some people didn't want to do it. And then they ended up — it kind of just lost steam, and they lost interest in it. And when they lose interest in it, you don't win,” Madden noted. “And the only way things work is if you're you know, if you have momentum, and we never had momentum at any point, but it's funny to hear that you (Steve) liked it because I get it all the time when I go out and I do things people are like, ‘Oh, we loved Retribution' and it's so interesting, because that entire period of my career was in the Thunderdome. So we had no live crowd. I was never Retribution in front of an audience. So we had no idea how the audience was reacting to it. We'd obviously look on Twitter and Twitter's you know, notoriously more negative. It would have been really fascinating to know how the audience would have reacted to the Retribution angle, just because that lets you pivot, you know, like, if they're like, ‘Oh, these guys are actually scary, then play into that. Oh, these guys are kind of ironically goofy, play into that.' But we'll never know. It's an alternate universe.”

Would Retribution have worked if they were allowed to wrestle in front of a live audience? Or would the reaction have been just as negative in front of crowds around the world as it was online, where they were routinely clowned for their goofy presentation? Unfortunately, as Madden noted, we will never get to find out.