First, WWE advertised John Cena for appearances on a slew of holiday tour dates including multiple TV tapings for WWE RAW and Smackdown Live. Then, Cena himself claimed in an interivew that he would not be returning to television at all during the tour.
However, earlier this week Vince McMahon himself took time on the Christmas Eve special edition of WWE RAW to announce that John Cena would be returning next week for BOTH the New Year’s Eve edition of RAW and the New Year’s Day edition of Smackdown Live.
Everybody following us still? Great.
Well, WWE in fact taped next week’s episode of RAW on Saturday night at the Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, MI and guess what — there was no John Cena. Unless he’s taken his whole “you can’t see me” gimmick to the next, extremely literal level, you will not be seeing him live in the ring this coming Monday night.
It remains to be seen whether or not the 16-time world champion will appear on the show in some kind of pre-recorded segment, but it seems incredibly shady that WWE would go out of their way to advertise him as appearing on both shows — especially when they wanted to sell tickets to this week’s taping events — only for him not to show up at all.
For what it’s worth, Cena was traveling with the Smackdown crew for their house show in Baltimore on Saturday night, where he faced Daniel Bryan in a steel cage for the WWE Championship.
ALSO NEXT WEEK: @JohnCena returns to #RAW and #SDLive! pic.twitter.com/IWHc6qCALF
— WWE (@WWE) December 25, 2018