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One of the biggest stories in WWE right now surrounds the SmackDown Women’s Championship, which Charlotte Flair won from Carmella after pinning Becky Lynch in a Triple Threat match at SummerSlam.
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Following the match, Becky congratulated her best friend in the middle of the ring before attacking her, seemingly turning heel for the first time on the main roster, while she betrayed her loyal fans during a villainous promo on SmackDown Live two days later.
When this has happened in the past (Sami Zayn last year, for example), the WWE Universe usually follows along with the storyline and begins to boo the bad guy, but that just isn’t working with Becky.
Instead, fans have started to boo new champion Charlotte, who they feel was unfairly added to the Carmella vs. Becky match at SummerSlam, and the positive crowd reactions for Becky have never been louder.
The most recent episode of SmackDown Live ended with Becky calling Charlotte a “b****” – something usually said by a babyface to get a response from the audience – and it looks like WWE has decided against turning the Irish “Lass Kicker” into a full-on heel for the time being.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at five previous examples where WWE had to change the direction of their storylines due to fans.
#5 Daniel Bryan’s WWE Championship chase
The most famous example of fans changing a storyline came in 2013-14 when the crowd reactions for Daniel Bryan became so loud that WWE had no choice but to start using him in main-event storylines.
In August 2013, Bryan defeated John Cena for the WWE Championship at SummerSlam. However, he quickly lost the title to Randy Orton, who cashed in his Money In The Bank contract, and he moved away from the WWE title picture two months later to begin a feud with Bray Wyatt.
The fans refused to accept that "The Leader of the Yes Movement" did not become the permanent holder of the title during his feud with Orton, and they famously hijacked a ‘Championship Ascension Ceremony’ between Orton and Cena in December 2013 by chanting Bryan’s name for almost the entire segment.
As the crowd reactions got louder, WWE’s decision-makers scrapped plans for Bryan vs. Sheamus at WrestleMania 30 and built the show around D-Bry, who pinned Triple H in the opening match (HHH's original opponent, CM Punk, walked out three months before the event) before defeating Batista and Orton in the main event to finally win the World Heavyweight Championship.
#4 Batista’s 2014 WWE return
At the same time that Daniel Bryan’s popularity was going through the roof, six-time WWE world champion Batista returned to the company in January 2014 and he was immediately rumoured to be winning that year’s Royal Rumble – a match that fans desperately wanted D-Bry to win.
As it turned out, the rumours were correct. Batista won the Rumble and Bryan didn’t even participate in the match, prompting the Pittsburgh fans to boo “The Animal” and turn him heel in the process.
The original plan had been for Batista to win the Rumble as a babyface and go on to defeat former Evolution partner Randy Orton for the World Heavyweight Championship in the main event of WrestleMania 30.
Instead, Batista, who wanted to return as a heel in the first place, portrayed a bad guy for most of his five-month run, which ended after back-to-back PPV defeats with Evolution against The Shield, and he never held the Heavyweight Championship again.
#3 Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns
The main event of WrestleMania 34, Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns, was a match that the majority of the New Orleans crowd didn’t want to see. As a result, they hijacked it from start to finish with irrelevant chants and didn’t seem to care even when Lesnar surprisingly retained his Universal Championship.
Four months on, and following a rematch at the Greatest Royal Rumble which ended in controversy, WWE decided to book the match again for the main event of SummerSlam – a bizarre call, on the face of it, when it was highly probable that the Brooklyn crowd would hijack it just like the New Orleans crowd did.
To avoid a repeat of the WrestleMania 34 situation, WWE wisely made the match last just six minutes and had Braun Strowman stand at ringside to tease a Money In The Bank cash-in.
It was great booking by WWE with or without the threat of fan hostility, but there’s a very good chance that they wouldn’t have booked the match in such a way had the crowd not hijacked the previous encounter at WrestleMania.
#2 The entire landscape of women’s wrestling
In February 2015, the Bella Twins defeated Emma & Paige in a 30-second match on Monday Night Raw.
What seemed like a relatively meaningless match turned out to be one of the most significant moments in the history of women’s wrestling, as the WWE Universe let their voices be heard on social media by making the hashtag #GiveDivasAChance trend on Twitter for the next three days.
From then on, and with talented up-and-comers including Charlotte Flair, Sasha Banks and Becky Lynch ready to make their main-roster debuts, 30-second matches became a thing of the past and WWE bowed to fans’ demands by making a conscious effort to give its female performers more storylines and time on television.
Three-and-a-half years later, women’s wrestling has never been more popular.
#1 Lex Luger vs. Yokozuna
WWE was going through some major changes in mid-1993. Monday Night Raw had recently launched and Vince McMahon wanted the roster to have a “youth movement”, preferring younger stars like Shawn Michaels to veterans like Randy Savage, while the legendary Hulk Hogan left the company.
With “The Hulkster” gone, Vince earmarked Lex Luger to be his all-American babyface replacement and sent him travelling around America on a red, white and blue bus, aka “The Lex Express”, to greet fans up and down the country.
The expectation at the time was that Luger would win the WWE Championship from Yokozuna at SummerSlam 1993, or at least on another occasion further down the line.
However, the likes of Bret Hart and The Undertaker were getting louder fan reactions during that time, despite Luger’s mega push, so WWE booked the SummerSlam match to end in a no disqualification win for Luger, meaning Yokozuna kept his title, and Yoko retained again at WrestleMania X the following year.
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