On Saturday Night’s Main Event in Salt Lake City a couple nights ago, WWE crowned two new champions — including CM Punk winning the World Heavyweight belt that Seth Rollins vacated due to injury.
The World Heavyweight title is Raw’s top prize, while the other title that changed hands was a SmackDown belt. But John Cena announced a tournament to determine his final opponent will start on Raw next Monday (Nov. 10) in Boston, and Dominik Mysterio retained the red brand’s secondary belt this weekend in Utah. That’s enough for WWE’s head booker Triple H (aka Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque) to tout a “new landscape” for the first post-SNME episode on Netflix tonight (Nov. 3).
Based on Netflix’s numbers, the uncertainty created by Rollins’ injury does seem to have generated interest in Raw. We’re also hearing louder complaints about bad creative and stale product than we have to this point in Levesque’s tenure. So shaking things up, and promoting the show that way, seems like a smart move to us.
Get ready tonight’s Raw with our preview here, and let us know what you expect from the show’s “new landscape” in the comments below. Could it be related to General Manager Adam Pearce’s mysterious hype for the show from his weekly card update video?
