A inside look into Johnson’s road to WrestleMania.
There’s a feature on ESPN’s website that was published by Mike Coppinger and Marc Raimondi. The article documented Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s upcoming return to in-ring competition on night one of WWE WrestleMania 40.
He’ll be tagging with Undisputed WWE Universal Champion Roman Reigns to take on Cody Rhodes and World Heavyweight Champion Seth Rollins.
Johnson first began training for WrestleMania in February. His two training locations were in Los Angeles and Hawaii. A ring was shipped to each location and the article notes that it cost tens of thousands of dollars to get the ring to Hawaii where Johnson trained alone. In Los Angeles, he worked with NXT’s Gallus faction (Mark Coffey, Joe Coffey & Wolfgang). Supervising those L.A. sessions were WWE producers Michael Hayes and Bobby Roode.
It is noted in the piece that after WrestleMania 40, Johnson is going to ‘jump right into’ filming for ‘The Smashing Machine’ biopic. He is playing the role of Mark Kerr.
He’s also working out with an eye toward his next movie role: MMA legend Mark Kerr in the upcoming “The Smashing Machine” biopic.
Johnson will jump right into making that film after WrestleMania, so in some ways it truly is an MMA training camp.
Circling back to the WrestleMania night one main event, Johnson, Reigns, Rollins and Rhodes got together at the 4/1 Raw in Brooklyn, New York to rehearse the match. There is going to be another rehearsal on 4/4 in Philadelphia.
In a later section of the write-up, WWE President Nick Khan shared that he wanted The Rock to return at WrestleMania 38 in Arlington, Texas.
Bringing The Rock back to the WWE universe would be as big as they come in terms of building the brand, but Khan, still relatively new in his role at the company, wanted to blow out a Rock return at WrestleMania 38 in Dallas. However, it didn’t come to fruition.
As far as Johnson’s future with WWE post-WrestleMania, he stated that he’s still on the TKO Board of Directors and he’ll always be a part of WWE. He said ‘this is our thing and will forever be our thing.’
