WWE Survivor Series 2025 has come and gone, and with it the WWE’s PLE calendar has come to a close for this year. The show drew mixed responses, with the main event in particular generally considered a disappointment given the caliber of star power involved and the WarGames gimmick attached. The match, in and of itself, wasn’t necessarily a dud but it did highlight a number of issues facing the main event picture in WWE.
There’s A Time And Place For Yeeting
Jey Uso’s Yeet entrance is fun and infectious with live crowds. It was a big part of getting Uso over as someone who would win the World Heavyweight Championship, and his run of winning the Rumble and taking that title off Gunther at WrestleMania only added to the gimmick. “Running it back”—cuing the team in the back to play the song again and get the crowd dancing a second time-is fun but went a beat too far when it started happening after matches were already underway.
This all came to a head at Survivor Series when Uso ran it back not only during a match, but during WarGames—a gimmick match WWE has successfully gotten over as one of the most violent and dangerous in the company’s lexicon. Choosing to Yeet mid-WarGames undermined the gravity of the situation. Worse yet, Uso’s team celebrated when there was only one opponent still to enter: Brock Lesnar. That choice was pure silliness when the babyface team should have been doing everything they could to fully incapacitate everyone from the heel team and to gather weapons to weather the storm of the match’s most imposing entrant.
Defenders of this spot will probably argue that the contrast between feel-good Yeeting into Lesnar’s music playing was the effect WWE was after, and that did work to a degree. The moment also sold Uso, his brother, and the two reigning men’s world champions as fools for playing along, though.
A Mystery Attacker Made The Difference In A Star-Studded Ten Man Match With A Steel Cage Around It
Pro wrestling has largely abandoned the mystique of the steel cage as a device to credibly keep interference out of a high-stakes match with decades of loopholes and workarounds deteriorating the credibility of that gimmick. Just the same, WarGames had maintained a sense of aura—despite not being an especially high cage, when ten competitors are involved, what point is there in anyone else getting inside?
Still, it was a masked mystery man scaling the cage, delivering Seth Rollins-inspired offense to CM Punk, and leaving that made all the difference, all but handing the heels the victory. While WWE did generate some buzz, hooded heels more or less wore out their welcome in the OG Bloodline era, and there’s the uncomfortable reality that no matter who wore the mask, he wasn’t a bigger star than Brock Lesnar, Roman Reigns, Cody Rhodes, or CM Punk, and probably not a bigger one than Drew McIntyre or Jey Uso while he was at it.
The prevailing theory is that it was, well, Austin Theory working that spot and it is good that the young talent will get a new direction and a push. Maybe WWE will string along the gimmick, with the masked man assisting Paul Heyman guys in another scenarios, up to and including helping Bron Breakker take the World Heavyweight Championship on the January 5 Raw. Just the same, the final PLE main event of the year, and a WarGames match no less, hinging on an unsolved mystery with a likely less-than-thrilling resolution understandably leaves a lot of fans disillusioned.
Bron Breakker Only Sort Of Gets A Big Push
On paper, the idea of Bron Breakker going the distance from starting WarGames to pinning the World Heavyweight Champion to win for his team forty minutes later is quite promising. In practice, though, The Unpredictable Badass didn’t exactly come across as a world beater.
On the heel team, Brock Lesnar wrecked everyone upon arrival. Bronson Reed unleashed a dominant wave of Tsunamis. Even Logan Paul had his moment to shine, KOing anything that moved with a pair of brass knuckles. While Breakker performed well, he had hardly felt like the best featured member of his team.
That all might have changed on the finish—Breakker spearing and pinning CM Punk. The masked man interference completely stole the thunder of that moment, though, in shifting the momentum of the match and more memorably setting the stage for the champ to eat the pin. The choice protected Punk and the babyface team, but also made the push for young Breakker feel half-hearted.
WarGames Felt Like A Placeholder
WrestleMania is the undisputed top show on the WWE calendar, and Triple H has done well in honoring tradition to keep ‘Mania special, and arguably bolser SummerSlam’s position as the number two show. Indeed, it’s telling that in 2025, WrestleMania and SummerSlam were the only PLEs at which men’s world titles changed hands.
There’s an awkward truth, though, that for so much of its history, Survivor Series has felt like a placeholder. While the Royal Rumble is routinely great and directly sets up ‘Mania, the best years for Survivor Series have tended to focus on team matches with meaningful stakes, like settling the WWE vs. Alliance feud in 2001 or determining authority figures in 2003 and 2014. It’s telling that so many years were reduced to silly brand supremacy angles that sometimes led to good matches but never felt as though they had meaningful stakes.
WWE apologists can say WWE set Cody Rhodes vs. Roman Reigns for WrestleMania in motion (maybe involving CM Punk in a Triple Threat), positioned Bron Breakker as a world title contender and maybe a new champion as soon as January, and got its masked mystery man angle going. Those are all legitimate points. They don’t change that an underwhelming WarGames match wound up an early chapter in ‘Mania storytelling and a setup for a big a Raw much more than a can’t-miss moment in WWE lore on its own merits.
WWE will keep chugging along, John Cena’s retirement match, Bron Breakker’s big moment, and a return to Vegas for WrestleMania all mapped out. Survivor Series 2025 drew a spotlight to glaring issues at the top of the card, though, that one has to hope Triple H and company will work on in 2026.
