Survivor Series: How WWE can turn a disappointing WarGames into a worthwhile WrestleMania

Let’s get the obvious part out of the way first: Saturday's Survivor Series was far from the best WWE show of the year — and most of the blame lies on the underwhelming main event. Even an excellent match between Dominik Mysterio and John Cena couldn’t save the overall PLE from feeling flat.

What the show did do well, though, was start to sow the seeds for next year’s WrestleMania season. Going into the weekend, we had very little clue what might be around the corner in Las Vegas. Now we can see a clear path to two massive main events on the men’s side, including Cody Rhodes vs. Roman Reigns III.

It’s true that Rhodes vs. Reigns is a bit of an obvious choice. In fact, it’s exactly what ChatGPT came up with when I asked it to generate a suitably exciting main event for next year’s WrestleMania, which might not help those persistent rumors about WWE using AI to book storylines.

Then again, AI is only going on information that's already on record, which is that Reigns and Rhodes have managed to blow the stadium roof off at WrestleMania twice before. What’s more, neither has lost any of their main-event star power since their last big match together at WrestleMania 40.

WWE has been keeping this particular card up its sleeve for a while now. They've also made the smart decision to let the pressure build slowly: Avoiding the temptation to have open warfare between the two rivals, and instead force them into uneasy alliances against common enemies.

Saturday night, that alliance finally seemed to come to an end. After the Reigns-Rhodes-Usos-Punk team was defeated in WarGames, “The American Nightmare” helped his former nemesis to his feet, only to be told — in no uncertain terms — that this will be the last time the two of them team together.

It follows a pretty big tease on this week’s "Raw” that Reigns wants to make a move on one of the world titles before long. That segment deliberately left things ambiguous as to which of his world champion teammates (CM Punk or Cody Rhodes) Reigns was looking at. After WarGames, we can probably work it out.

Not that CM Punk emerged entirely unscathed either. Against the odds, it turned out that the world champion was the one to take the pin in the main event. And who was it that managed to put the world champion’s shoulders to the mat? Not Brock Lesnar, but a certain Bron Breakker.

Hey, perhaps Punk just drew the short straw backstage. Or, more excitingly, maybe WWE is actually building toward Bron Breakker vs. CM Punk at next year’s WrestleMania — thus finally giving Steiner Jr. that world title push we all know he deserves.

Paul Heyman hinted as much during the post-show, claiming that it was “obvious” that The Vision would end up main-eventing WrestleMania in some capacity — before making a specific reference to Bron Breakker pinning Punk. Sure, he was in character at the time, but it’s not hard to detect some truth underneath.

If that happens, I won’t complain. Just last week, I was saying Breakker risked being totally overshadowed at WarGames, the very event that was meant to help push The Vision. Now he has a path not just toward a world title match at WrestleMania, but a potential title defense against a returning Seth Rollins at next year’s SummerSlam. What a year that would be.

If that looks like a good start for 2026, it’s worth noting that the picture still looks hazy on the women’s side, with WarGames providing zero hints as to what next year might look like. It probably didn’t help that neither of the two world champions was in the match, with Jade Cargill left off the event entirely for reasons unclear.

If we’re assuming the current two champs carry through to WrestleMania, then the obvious fantasy picks would be Rhea Ripley vs. Stephanie Vaquer and Jade Cargill vs. Bianca Belair. Who knows, maybe that’s what we’ll end up getting. Right now, though, we have virtually zero to go on, leaving us with guesswork.

Let’s hope WWE starts filling in the gaps on that front before long. We saw this past year with the undercooked Tiffany Stratton and Charlotte Flair feud that you can’t just rely on the Rumble alone to build 'Mania title matches; there needs to be some actual pitch-rolling beforehand. That’s not the sort of mistake you want to make for two years running.

Still, it looks like at least one half of next year’s WrestleMania season is beginning to take shape. We know from Paul Heyman’s big interview on "The Ariel Helwani Show" this year that WWE puts a disproportionate amount of its creative focus on building something suitably special for these once-a-year events, sometimes thinking more than a year in advance.

Based on what we saw last night, the preparations might just be moving to the next stage of the process — and looking rather juicy too.