John Cena is one of the most popular figures in entertainment wrestling. Cena is currently signed up with the WWE brand and is a WWE Superstar for a long time now. He currently performs under the Smackdown brand of the WWE. If you are interested in knowing John Cena net worth, you have come at the right place.
Who is John Cena?
Cena came in the limelight sometime in the late nineties and has since then been a permanent fixture in the world of sports entertainment. Critics and veterans say that Cena has the mass appeal to take the sport ahead singlehandedly as Hulk Hogan did in the early seventies and throughout the eighties.
In India, John Cena has a massive following among young adults and kids. He has a clean image and has a positive character. He has rarely played what’s known as a ‘heel’, the negative character in his career with the WWE.
John Cena Criticism
But all is not hunky-dory for Cena, and the way the company handles him has come under some criticism. Some say that Vince McMahon and company do not allow John Cena to make his character more interesting or repackage it because of worries that it might not sit well with the massive mainstream following that he has.
WWE does allow creative control to several wrestlers, and that’s the reason you see complete repackages now and then. One of the most important ones in recent times was by Bray Wyatt, who has until now played three characters, the third one being entirely edgy. In retrospect, whenever Cena does a makeover, he becomes more and more mainstream.
Creative control doesn’t just mean the character’s look, but also what they say and do in the ring. Of course, this means that many of them have a say in the storylines their characters will undergo on the brands that WWE owns.
Wrestling Style
When Cena made his debut in 2005, he did it was the doctor of Thuganomics, a rapping young punk who’d call out the others in the business. It was this avatar that made him as popular as the WWE wanted him.
Since then, Cena has rarely ever cheated or lost. Even if he has, it’s either been a long-lasting, record-breaking match that goes through all the twists and turns that a WWE pro-wrestling match would. Some victories like these have prompted the memes ‘CenaWinsLOL’.
John Cena’s matches are a typical big storyline that the WWE uses now and then. The matches themselves are long and show off his resilience as well as his strength. Most of his matches are with other excellent workers like Triple H, The Undertaker, Batista and others. These individuals can give the crowd the entertainment they deserve and expect.
John Cena has performed with them all, from the Undertaker to Hulk Hogan to the Rock. Now, his job in the company is to put over the other upcoming talent and raise the rankings whenever they come down a little bit. Putting over a character means having a feud with the younger talent and playing the game of winning and losing matches against them so that the audience gets to see the newer talent battle it out with the veterans, in this case, John Cena. Every veteran has had to do this sometime or the other in the WWE and sports entertainment setups.
All said and done, Cena is the Gold standard for WWE and is easily in the top 10 WWE stars in the world, maybe forever.
Early Wrestling Days
To begin with, Cena organically joined the WWE. He joined sometime in the 2000s, which meant that the corporation was becoming more corporate. They could no longer afford to hire talent just by looking at their physiques on the front of magazine covers. So, the likes of John Cena had to cut their teeth in the minor leagues – the smaller wrestling companies in various circuits before they got their call up to the WWE. This system is so perfectly in place that the WWE set up another show from all that – the NXT.
Cena’s journey began in 1999 with the Ultimate Pro-Wrestling. By 2000, he won the strap. He moved on to the WWE in October 2000. In 2001, he signed a developmental contract with the WWE and worked the Ohio Valley Wrestling Division. Since then, Cena has been a formidable factor in the WWE storylines and one of the biggest names in the company. He has headlined Wrestlemania five times, which is a record in itself.
John Cena Paydays
Of course, the paydays increase as the potential crowds at the venue increase. The pay, if he performs at a house show is lesser than what he would make at a PPV. And what he makes at a PPV will be substantially lesser than what he’d earn by headlining Wrestlemania – or even being a part of it.
Cena made his entry into the world of sports entertainment at the right time. Gone were the seventies and the eighties when the professional wrestlers would double up as road managers and even sellers of merchandise. The big bubble that Terry Bollea and Vince McMahon had created was now on juggernaut mode. The industry was getting streamlined.
More channels were embracing this programming. The world was looking up the WWE, sports entertainment and Cena. Today, there are several avenues for WWE superstars to make money. One, they have an iron-clad contract with the WWE, which differs from person to person, including the number of appearances that they have, when they have it, so on and so forth. All this, of course adds to John Cena net worth
Two, they now earn money with their merchandises that sell all over the country and the world, including India. Merchandise is one of the most prominent earning sources for a WWE superstar today. This merchandise includes T-shirts, jackets and bobbleheads, so on and so forth. While the merchandise is one of the earning sources, another bigger one is signing up with console games.
For John Cena net worth though, these aren’t the only sources of income. He is one of the few WWE superstars – only the third one – to have a Hollywood career. Before him, The Rock successfully became one of the hottest stars in Hollywood. Hulk Hogan tried but couldn’t cut it. Others who did were Stone Cold Steve Austin, who still can hasn’t got that one big break.
Then there’s Rowdy Roddy Piper and Batista. Batista is a legit brand because of his time with Marvel. Rock has at least two franchises under his belt. Every other movie he stars in automatically becomes a tent pole movie. John Cena is just joining the crowd with films like Bumblebee and others. He has had successful movies, like the Marine, but that was back in 2006. That film has spawned five sequels, but all of them were direct-to-video and didn’t feature John Cena.
John Cena Net Worth
So, at the age of 44, John Cena is worth around 60 million. He doesn’t flaunt his wealth. One of the reasons Cena is so low-key is because he doesn’t believe in courting controversy. The professional wrestling world is choc-a-bloc with stories of the shenanigans of the superstars, but we have never heard or read anything about John Cena. There’s no official reason behind this, but everyone is of the opinion that if there’s anyone from the world of entertainment who’d run for political office and win it, after the likes of Kane, Arnold Schwarzenegger, it is John Cena. While what Cena makes, and John Cena net worth might seem staggering, he is still small cry when compared to Dwayne Johnson, who is worth well over 200 million at the time of writing this article.
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