WWE Friday Night SmackDown comes waltzing back into our lives tonight (April 18, 2025) with a live show emanating from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, featuring all the latest build to the upcoming WrestleMania 41 extravaganza scheduled for tomorrow night just down the road at Allegiant Stadium.
Advertised for tonight: It’s WrestleMania SmackDown and WWE Champion Cody Rhodes is back again. More importantly, so is his challenger on Sunday night, none other than John Cena.
Plus, the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal returns for another year, The Street Profits put the WWE tag team titles on the line against the Motor City Machine Guns, six-woman tag team action, and a whole lot more!
Come right back here at 8 pm ET when the SmackDown live blog kicks off once the show starts on USA Network. It will be below this line here. (Note: Links to illegal streams are prohibited. Pics and GIFs are allowed.)
WWE SMACKDOWN RESULTS AND LIVE BLOG FOR APRIL 18
All of your life, they try to take your cover, turn you into another and make you change your name. When you fall, it’s up to you to recover, you can’t depend on another to help you with the pain, but me? You can rely on me to liveblog this here pro wrestling show for you, folks.
The show opens with commentary hyping tonight’s festivities up, followed by the usual montage of talent arriving at the arena.
LA Knight attacks Tama Tonga in the parking lot and slams his arm in the door of a car!
Seth Rollins makes his entrance, wearing a black and white suit festooned with roses and butterflies, and he gets on the mic.
He pointedly sits crosslegged on the mat before beginning and says we’ll get to Roman Reigns in a minute but the crowd started chanting for CM Punk first so we’re gonna start with him. That’s why Punk came back, right? Except when CM came back, it wasn’t to a WWE ring. So did he come back because of the chants or because somebody wrote him a big fat check?
But when he burned that bridge like every other one he did come back to WWE after ten long years, and was that because of the chants? No, it was because they wrote him another big, fat check. He calls Punk a liar, a fraud and a coward, and say what you will about Roman, he doesn’t even pretend to care about the fans.
Reigns is just in the business of Roman Reigns, And all of this started twelve years ago with Paul Heyman, when he brought them into WWE to be a Shield for CM Punk, but does he get any credit? No, because everyone in the back wanted the cameras and spotlight on Roman Reigns. It was always about him being the next John Cena, the next cash cow for WWE.
And every single year this went along and after Punk took his ball and went home, Seth heard little echoes of CM Punk chants. Last year with his knee in shreds, with his father dying of cancer, he expended every effort to be here in this ring, to be a Shield for Cody Rhodes and to make sure Roman Reigns lost.
Tomorrow is the most important triple threat in WWE history, and Rollins will put his body on the line and sacrifice everything he has to make sure this industry moves forward in the right direction, and that’s not a prediction, that’s a spoiler.
Commentary runs down the cards for both nights of WrestleMania 41.
Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal in Memory of Andre the Giant
