WWE Crown Jewel 2023 is just a day away now and the hype for it couldn’t get any stronger. WWE stars like Roman Reigns and John Cena will travel to Saudi Arabia for the PLE and entertain fans for the mega event. But, traveling thousands of miles away also means that the SmackDown episode to be aired on 3 November will be pre taped.

Although pre taping an episode before a major PLE sounds like a sane choice, fans also noticed something bizarre with everything. For some undisclosed reason, WWE did not advertise John Cena and Roman Reigns for the 3 November episode of SmackDown. This poses another big question: will the skyrocketing ratings of WWE SmackDown take a hit after this?

Will Roman Reigns and John Cena not be present on SmackDown?

WWE SmackDown has become one of the most popular pro wrestling shows worldwide and gives competition to WWE RAW as the premier show in WWE. The blue brand has been raking in tons of views and good ratings week after week for quite some time. However, the glorious streak of SmackDown may abruptly perish because of an unforeseen event.

Roman Reigns has been leading the blue brand despite not always being present in the arena. But, the system of SmackDown didn’t fail as John Cena arrived just in time to propel the show to even greater heights. Because of this, the WWE Universe was absolutely shocked when they noticed that Reigns and Cena weren’t featured in WWE’s 3 November advertising.

Both superstars have managed to create the magnetism that was needed for Crown Jewel 2023. Hence, it doesn’t sense for the show to just drop them. Especially when the episode is going to be pre taped. 

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While the show does have stars like LA Knight, there is a high chance that the viewership will fall because of this. In fact, the viewership has already taken a massive hit in the previous week.

The absence of Cena and Reigns poses a high risk of sinking the ship of SmackDown

According to the week-by-week viewership of SmackDown since 22 September, more and more people tuned in every week to watch the show. From 2.227 million views on 22 September, the viewership rose to 2.417 million views on 13th October. This was followed by a marginal slip on 20th October, when the view count stopped at 2.254 million.

Although a slight dip is always expected, views plummeted by half the very next week. In fact, the 27 September episode only generated 1.145 million viewers. This episode carried big expectations since it was the last live show before Crown Jewel. However, things didn’t play out very well.

Thus, keeping John Cena and Roman Reigns out of the advertisement of SmackDown will definitely hurt the viewership numbers. A prerecorded episode is already bad as it will lead to spoilers and decreased view count. What are your thoughts on this? Let them flow in the comments.

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