Roman Reigns “I’m Leaving” & Rhea Ripley Lesbian? – WWE News
The WWE Royal Rumble 2023 PPV is in the past and the situation with The Bloodline has confused and shocked wrestling fans with Sami Zayn betraying Roman Reigns.
Hulk Hogan signed a new 3-year deal with WCW 4 days before the PPV. Hogan had a 5-year offer from WWF on the table that he turned down. WWF’s offer was reportedly for $5 million per year and would have started with Hogan making a surprise return at Royal Rumble and winning it, leading to another world title run as a heel.
Randy Savage’s WCW future is still in question. He was still negotiating with Eric Bischoff during the week but hadn’t come to terms on a new deal yet. WWF had hoped to bring back both Hogan and Savage at about the same time, and have them resume their WCW feud in WWF, which would have been a huge blow to WCW. But with Hogan deciding to stay with WCW, it really hurts Savage’s bargaining power with WWF, so right now, no one knows where he’ll end up.
Monday Night Raw’s start-time will be moving up one hour. The decision was made by USA Network fairly abruptly and didn’t give WWF much time to promote the time change, so it’s probably going to take a couple of weeks before the normal Raw audience gets familiar with the new time change. WCW Nitro has been starting an hour ahead of Raw for awhile now and it gives WCW a strong head start on hooking viewers so they stick around for the 2nd hour. So this move means Raw will be going head-to-head with Nitro’s first hour instead of it’s second. This also helps WWF avoid having to go up against Monday Night Football. There are still no plans for them to follow WCW’s lead and extend Raw to 2 hours as of yet.
As mentioned, WCW’s Halloween Havoc is in the books. The show broke WCW’s all-time live gate record, bringing in over $220,000 in ticket sales and another $69,000 in merch sales which was also a record. Half the merch sales were NWO products, which has been a huge seller everywhere. Dean Malenko vs. Rey Mysterio Jr. was the best match. Eddie Guerrero wrestled sick, with a high fever and also broke a rib during his match, causing them to end the match earlier than planned. When giving results, Dave says, “The ghost of Hulk Hogan pinned the corpse of Randy Savage in 18:37 of what turned into a Jimmy Valiant style comedy match which made no sense given the storyline of this as the ultimate grudge match.” Hogan wrestled the first several minutes in a wig and sunglasses that didn’t come off, which should tell you just how physical that match was.
