The original plan for WrestleMania XL was for Cody Rhodes to challenge Roman Reigns for the Undisputed WWE Championship. While that match did indeed happen, things changed when The Rock returned to WWE and inserted himself into the Show of Shows.
As a newly named member of the TKO Holdings board, Dwayne Johnson convinced executives that the much bigger main event was himself taking on his real-life cousin on the Grandest Stage of Them All.
While it is a massive match, it's not the one fans wanted and the backlash that followed was very vocal and extremely swift. As a result, WWE was forced to pivot, giving fans what they wanted on Sunday and a tag team match involving The Rock the night before.
Talking to Inside The Ropes Magazine, Rhodes was asked about previous comments from The Rock's personal writer, Brian Gewirtz, that fans would not have liked the alternative plan for the American Nightmare at WrestleMania had The Rock vs. Reigns happened.
"If people knew the real plan for me, they’d be even more angry," Rhodes admitted. "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? I had a really good team of people around me."
"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 I thought, that’s insane, that’s madness. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, and he was right."
He added, "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 realised maybe I had every right to be confident. Maybe I had every right to not be concerned. But yeah, definitely, let’s say it was a Wheatley Vodka-sponsored few days."
We've previously heard of there being two possible plans for Rhodes; the first was for him to miss the PLE altogether as a result of an "injury," while the other would have seen him challenge Seth Rollins for the World Heavyweight Champion.
WWE started heading in that direction by airing a video package on RAW which hyped up the title's importance but Rhodes had already made it clear that he had no interest in the belt.
Thankfully, Triple H won out and WrestleMania proceeded as planned with arguably one of the event's greatest main events ever.