WWE: Update on Charlotte Flair & Tiffany Stratton’s Promo Segment Issues on 4/4 WWE SmackDown Show, Damien Priest Issues Challenge to Drew McIntyre for WrestleMania 41, More on NXT April 1, 2025 Viewership, More News

Apr 5, 2025

Update on Charlotte Flair & Tiffany Stratton’s Face-to-Face Promo Segment on Friday’s WWE SmackDown Show

Friday’s WWE SmackDown show in Chicago, Illinois featured an in-ring face-to-face interview segment involving Charlotte Flair and current WWE Women’s Champion Tiffany Stratton. This segment was notable for feeling like it went off the rails at points and Stratton’s insults directed at Flair’s history of failed marriages and her family and Flair implying that Stratton’s boyfriend Ludwig Kaiser is cheating with her.

WrestleVotes reported that Flair and Stratton went off script by quite a bit based on WWE’s show rundown script for the show. It was reported that very little of what they were planned to say was actually said for their segment.

Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp reported that WWE had editted out all of the personal jabs including Stratton’s line referencing Flair’s history of divorces for the video clip of the segment on their Twitter and YouTube accounts.

Here is the full Tiffany Stratton and Charlotte Flair segment from #Smackdown

That was definitely NOT it 😭💀 pic.twitter.com/1bej9yAh1b
— Wrestling Pics & Clips (@WrestleClips) April 5, 2025

Damien Priest Issues Match Challenge to Drew McIntyre for WrestleMania 41

Friday’s WWE SmackDown show in Chicago, Illinois also featured one new potential match for the card of WrestleMania 41, which takes place on April 19-20 at the Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This new potential match is a singles match of Damian Priest vs. Drew McIntyre.

This new potential match was setup following recent weeks shows over Priest and McIntyre’s bad blood issues stemming from this past February’s Royal Rumble 2025 event. During Friday’s show, a video aired featuring McIntyre wearing an eye patch due to his eye injury from last week’s show and talked about how Priest does not fight light a man and how he needs to pray since when he does, bad things happen. In a follow-up segment, Priest was shown backstage talking about McIntyre blaming others for when bad things happen to him and issued a challenge to McIntyre for a match at WrestleMania.

.@ArcherOfInfamy wants revenge… 👀
#SmackDown pic.twitter.com/H9oEGc8zfM
— WWE (@WWE) April 5, 2025

More on NXT April 1, 2025 Viewership

The April 1st episode of WWE NXT saw NXT suffer a very large decline in overall viewership and a slight decline in key demographic ratings.

NXT drew 650,000 viewers and a 0.15 key demographic rating on The CW.

Dave Meltzer reported in this week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter that the main reasons for NXT’s decreases this week was due to the large declines from their Over 50 demographic viewership, which its percentage was not given, and younger key demographic viewership group, which was down 10% compared to last week’s show.

In terms of head-to-head competition, the NBA game of Phoenix Suns vs, Milwaukee Bucks drew 684,000 viewers on TNT, the 2025 NIT Men’s Basketball Tournament game of UC Irvine vs. North Texas drew 347,000 viewers on ESPN, the 2025 NIT Men’s Basketball Tournament game of Loyola-Chicago vs. UT Chattanooga drew 228,000 viewers on ESPN2, the MLB game of Arizona Diamondbacks vs. New York Yankees drew 491,000 viewers on TBS, Curse of Oak Island drew 1,670,000 viewers on History Channel, Love & Hip Hop Atlanta drew 337,000 viewers on MTV, and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills drew 971,000 viewers on BRAVO.

In terms of key demographic viewership, NXT had 200,000 viewers. Meltzer reported that NXT’s male/female viewership skew was 62.1% in favor of males.

In terms of yearly comparisons, NXT was up 1.4% in overall viewership and but down 24.2% in key demographic viewership.

WWE News & Notes

As noted before, WWE has been considering plans to potentially induct the late Kamala, real name James Harris, into their Hall of Fame as a member of this year’s class of inductees. WrestleVotes reported that their sources stated that Kamala will not be part of this year’s Hall of Fame class. Those spoken to stated that talks between WWE and Harris’ family have remained positive. It was also reported that the current belief is that Kamala will be inducted into WWE’s Hall of Fame in the future.

As noted before, Giovanni Vinci was released by WWE on Friday as part of a new batch of talent releases. In a recent Q&A article, PWInsider’s Mike Johnson reported that his sources stated that WWE officials plans for Vinci was different than what was ended done for him for his singles run on SmackDown. Johnson reported that it is currently not known what was WWE’s original plans for him nor the reason why it was dropped.

WWE recently revealed the next match in their on-going countdown of their Top 50 matches in WrestleMania history. The 13th spot was the singles match of The Rock vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin from WrestleMania XIX.

WWE also recently released one new video to their WCW Vault channel on YouTube. This new video was a WCW World Television Championship match of Eddie Guerrero vs. Booker T (c) from WCW Uncensored 1998.

WWE also recently released two new videos to their WWE Vault channel on YouTube. The first new video was the full “Stone Cold” and Bret Hart break down WrestleMania 13 epic: Broken Skull Sessions” episode. The second new video was a WWE Championship Special Guest Referee match of Bret “The Hitman” Hart vs. Yokozuna (c) from WWE WrestleMania X.

WWE also recently released one new video to their NXT Vault channel on YouTube. This new video was the full June 19, 2014 episode of WWE NXT.

In a recent interview with Barstool Sports’ Pardon My Take podcast, Cody Rhodes gave his thoughts about his acting role in the upcoming new The Naked Gun comedy action film. Rhodes stated “Yeah, I have a little cameo. I feel a little weird because they keep promoting me — You know what, I’m happy they’re promoting me, it’s pretty cool. I got to do a scene with Liam Neeson. There’s so many different things you can say, Liam Neeson this movie, Liam Neeson that movie, I’m a diehard Star Wars fan so this is Qui-Gon Jinn, this is Liam Neeson. It’s a yes. He was the coolest guy. The way he was doing every scene, he’d take it a little differently. It was cool to chop up with him and learn from him in that moment, it was very fun.” (Transcript h/t: Fightful.com)