Add as a preferred source on Google The recent wave of WWE releases had picked up a backstage explanation, but it’s already being dismissed as false.
In recent days, a story made the rounds among talent that someone connected to TKO didn’t like darker characters, which would explain the departures of The Wyatt Sicks, Aleister Black, and Zelina Vega. Mike Johnson of PWInsider reported that he heard the story more than once but made it clear it was unverified.
However, according to Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the story is “bullshit.” The journalist said those decisions wouldn’t have even reached that level within TKO.
The final decision on the cuts would have been Triple H’s, with input from Nick Khan. The internal read is that Wyatt Sicks had already delivered everything it could, while Black and Vega simply didn’t have any meaningful creative plans for the future.
The list of releases, announced on 04/24, included Bo Dallas, Nikki Cross, Joe Gacy, Erick Rowan, Dexter Lumis, Kairi Sane, Aleister Black, Zelina Vega, Motor City Machine Guns, and Santos Escobar, among other names.
Despite TKO’s weight as WWE’s controlling company, the situation is being treated backstage as a roster reorganization decision, involving budget, creative space, and new call-ups from NXT.
In other words, the departure of several darker characters at the same time may have created the appearance of a pattern, but so far, there is no real indication that TKO ordered the cuts for that reason.