WWE’s Money In The Bank Problem

Downhill From There

What do you mean the next one was even shorter? Yes, also in 2010 WWE introduced the Money in the Bank pay per view where more than one contract would typically be fought over. And this will be a point of discussion here but let’s keep looking at the winners for a moment. Here WWE’s solid batting average for Money in the Bank stories just begins to decline. As with much of the rest of the product you can start to see a laziness and a complacency in a lot of the storylines from around this time.

In this instance, it almost felt like as WWE introduced a Raw briefcase and a SmackDown briefcase that was a chance to just have one of them be a throwaway. The first year, Kane won the first briefcase and cashed it in an hour later. Now I can vibe with this, someone had to be the first to cash it in the same night and if WWE was trying to establish the Money in the Bank pay per view brand as being an exciting show where anything can happen they accomplished that. And you can get away with that if you do have another briefcase to also give fans the longer run they might want to see. In this case with The Miz having a solid run and winning the WWE Championship months later.

However, the law of diminishing returns reared its ugly head because having two briefcases really was a booking shortcut that WWE was going to exploit over the next few years. You started seeing a dud Mr. Money in the Bank every year it seemed, just because WWE didn’t feel it necessary to make the stories behind the cash-ins a bit more distinct.

Alberto Del Rio wins the red case in 2011 and he holds it for a month, there’s nothing to it and his cash in isn’t built to, built up, paid off, or made to feel interesting in any way. It’s as if they decided the contract was the interesting part and stopped crafting stories specific to the briefcase because this would happen with medium regularity. Semi-infrequently perhaps.

John Cena cashed it in after eight days for a one-on-one match that ended in a DQ via ‘wild Big Show appears’ and even just that goes to show that the effort into developing these moments just wasn’t there like it was. For years everyone fantasy booked how the first Money in the Bank cash-in failure would go. How could it be done to make the moment awesome and not kill the gimmick? Have a babyface at 1 HP valiantly mount a comeback against a heel and retain his title and it would be so cool. Instead, they just had Cena get bonked by the Big Show and the Money in the Bank contract has rarely looked this bad again. I wish I could say never but… I can’t.

Thankfully there were some great ones mixed in here like Dolph Ziggler and Seth Rollins who did get the unique Money in the Bank moments that were still attainable like cashing in at WrestleMania or the day after, but now seemingly more and more often the Money in the Bank contract was just the prop that got WWE through whatever SummerSlam writer’s block they were dealing with that year. Del Rio beats Punk at SummerSlam, Cena enters the title program before SummerSlam, Randy Orton cashes in at SummerSlam, it was happening a little too often in a short time period and even when the cash-in was very successful and unique in the case of Orton with the birth of The Authority, it still felt like we’d seen part of it before.

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