WWE Rumor: WWE Recruiting Batista For ‘WrestleMania 32’
During his time away from WWE, and in the last two years especially, Dave Bautista, a.k.a Batista has found a lot of success in Hollywood, which was his main goal when he initially left WWE back in 2010. Like anything else, it took a while for him to find huge success, but after Guardians of the Galaxy was released last year, Batista, who played Drax the Destroyer in the film, began receiving more movie offers than ever before.
Due to his success in Hollywood, Batista hasn’t been around WWE much. In fact, other than a brief, five-month run last year, Batista has been out of the company for the better part of five years.
While promoting the upcoming release of the movie Spectre, which is the latest James Bond film where Batista plays a villain reminiscent of classic Bond villains like Jaws, “The Animal” expressed his desire to return to the ring, but he also said that his primary focus right now is acting.
Batista, who is 46, also added that he would much rather return to WWE and just do the live events because there are a lot fewer restrictions on those shows. Another reason why he just wants to do live events is because he doesn’t like dealing with the WWE creative team, which in his words made his WWE run in 2014 extremely difficult, and the WWE creative team isn’t present at WWE’s non-televised live events.
With WrestleMania 32 coming up in the spring, which WWE hopes will be the biggest wrestling pay-per-view of all-time, and with both Seth Rollins and Randy Orton likely missing the event due to injury, WWE is looking to bring back some big names to fill in for some of their injured superstars, and Batista is one name of their list.
Following the Cesaro vs. Sheamus match on Monday’s RAW, WWE went out of their way to congratulate Batista on the success of Spectre, which opened this past weekend. According to Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer, WWE went out of their way to congratulate him because they’re hoping that he’ll agree to have a match at WrestleMania 32. In other words, WWE is being nice to Batista, hoping that he’ll help them out down the road, as they’re in dire need of roster depth.
Meltzer also went on to say that he’s not sure if Batista’s schedule is going to allow him to do WrestleMania this coming April. On top of that, the movie studios don’t like guys like Batista and The Rock wrestling while they’re in the middle of filming because there’s a chance that they can get injured, thus pushing back the filming schedule until they’re able to recover. That happened with The Rock in 2013, when his injury following his match with John Cena forced the filming of Hercules to be pushed back.
“I don’t know if [Batista’s] schedule is going to allow him to [work WrestleMania]. Because Guardians of the Galaxy 2 starts filming in mid-January, and he’s in that movie, and he may have other things lined up after that. It’s possible. [Batista and WWE] have probably had some communication. But the movie people don’t exactly like WWE using these guys because of The Rock thing with Hercules when he got hurt, and they had to push the movie back several weeks.”
Batista isn’t the only ex-WWE World Heavyweight Champion that WWE is wanting to wrestle at WrestleMania 32, as names like The Rock, Chris Jericho, Goldberg, and, while it’s extremely unlikely, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin have been rumored to be having matches on WWE’s grandest stage next spring.
[Image via WWE]
