Summary

Karrion Kross says his planned WrestleMania 39 program with Bray Wyatt was ultimately shut down after Vince McMahon re-entered the WWE creative picture.

The update came after Kross had previously said he was lined up to work with Wyatt on the show. During a new interview setting, Scarlett explained that she and Kross started noticing rapid last-minute changes to creative plans, and those shifts made them feel the direction they had returned for was no longer going to happen.

What the WrestleMania 39 change says about WWE creative

If Kross and Wyatt were originally headed toward WrestleMania 39, then McMahon's reported return to influence had a direct effect on a featured program involving two heavily protected acts. That also lines up with other accounts of Vince McMahon's reported influence on WWE creative before WrestleMania 40, which has remained a talking point around that period.

For Kross, the bigger takeaway is that the stop-start creative around his return may have cost him one of his highest-profile singles programs. For fans, it adds another layer to the long-running question of how much changed behind the scenes once WrestleMania season plans were being finalized.

Quote from Scarlett

Speaking while appearing with Denise Salcedo, Scarlett said:

"He wasn’t publicly out in the company, but we started talking to different producers, and we were like, this show’s starting to feel really weird. The booking started to feel weird. Things started changing last minute. This is starting to feel like it did before Vince left, it feels exactly the same."

Scarlett later went on to say:

"And then a few producers probably told us he’s back. But it was one of those things where people knew but didn’t talk about it because there was no certainty about it. We didn’t see him around or anything at that time.

Just specific people here and there, if you had friends who knew, basically. Not everyone knew this.

You can’t talk about things that you don’t know for sure, things that are just rumors, things like that. You have no proof of it, so there’s no way to really talk about it. You’re just hoping, again, for the best. And I’m like, I’m just going to make whatever they give us look as good as possible, no matter what it is.

But we just felt like the storylines were changing very quickly, and what we were brought back for was not going to happen. It felt like things kind of fell off, but we were just trying to make the best of everything."

Sources

As reported by NoDQ.