Monday night’s Ultimate Deletion match provided two clues to the future of WWE programming. The first being that fans will absolutely be seeing more of those Ultimate Deletion matches in all of their B-movie glory, and the other is that the loser of the match, Bray Wyatt, is rumored to be receiving a much-needed character reboot. His carcass was never found in the Lake of Reincarnation, after all.
If you’re a fan of The Eater of Worlds, you’ve been dying for some sort of change when it came to Wyatt’s onscreen persona. The character reached far beyond its expiration date without any sort of grand payoff to it. The promos got old, the feuds were nonsensical, and sadly what was one of the hottest gimmicks in wrestling just a couple of years ago had fizzled out. We won’t even discuss the Sister Abigail stuff.
Which might have been one of the motivations for the Ultimate Deletion match in the first place. Fans have been aching for a change in the Wyatt character for a long time, and ever since he lost the WWE Championship last year, especially, things have been grim for the former leader of the Wyatt Family.
On a recent edition of Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer reported that, from his understanding, Wyatt will be repackaged before he reappears on WWE. (Transcript via Ringside News.)
“So, I guess he’s going to come back different. I think it’s been a year of needing repackaging. I don’t know what he’ll do but hopefully it’s something completely different because the other character ran its course a long time ago.”
There are fair criticisms, considering that everyone who was in the Wyatt Family stable has surpassed the patriarch (or at the very least is in a more spotlighted position than Wyatt at the moment). Braun Strowman is one of the most over characters in WWE, and for now the Bludgeon Brothers are about to get a date with The Usos and The New Day for the Smackdown tag team titles at WrestleMania.
Moreover, with as gifted as Wyatt is on the microphone and in the ring, and for how dedicated he’s always been to trying to make a character work, for him to be floundering as he is now is a disservice to everyone. Hopefully, some form of the character comes back and shows what the new Bray Wyatt can do.
