It only took about two months for WWE to burn through the men's and women's Money in the Bank contract cash-ins, with Naomi and Seth Rollins exchanging their respective briefcases for world championships. Chief Content Officer Paul "Triple H" Levesque's haste to get the lucrative luggage on and off television reflects his reported dislike for the concept.
You can blame Levesque for many of WWE's current creative and administrative issues (and for skirting responsibility when the company gets called out for these problems) but not for feeling how he does about Money in the Bank.
Like a lot of things WWE has done over the years, the trope has become a stale exercise done more out of obligation than anything else, and whether or not a wrestler cashed in successfully, it has rarely turned them into marquee names.
This is why Money in the Bank (and, more broadly, the "cash-in" trope) needs to go away
When it comes to Money in the Bank and angles like it, one of the obvious issues is the lack of innovative ideas for it. Since Edge's original cash-in on John Cena in 2006 (nearly two decades ago, sheesh), WWE has seldom deviated from the "cash in on a weakened champion" template, even if the briefcase holder is a babyface.
While there's nothing wrong with sparingly reusing angles, you can't go back to the same well for nearly 20 years and expect to get the same fresh pail of water. WWE could've at least booked more of the babyface winners to challenge the champions with advance notice. That scenario has far more interesting implications for the Money in the Bank winner, regardless of whether they win or lose.
Plus, if you truly see the briefcase holder as a main eventer, announcing the match ahead of time gives you a chance to see how much of a draw the person is. Doing the same old stuff tells you nothing.
It also doesn't help you create stars. You would think that winning a match that theoretically fast tracks you to the top of the card would lead to a higher hit rate for headliners, but ineffective pre-and-post-cash-in writing halted most of the Money in the Bank winners' ascension.
WWE's longstanding insistence on booking the briefcase winners to lose numerous matches before using the title shot -- a lazy attempt at misdirection by the promotion -- dinged enough of the wrestlers' in-ring credibility to make the fans see them as illegitimate champions. And unfortunately, weaker champions mean more terrible finishes to title matches.
All these years of practice haven't helped WWE figure this out, either, as the early returns for Naomi and Rollins' respective reigns have shown. The former has settled in as a by-the-book heel champion who (if everything is ok with her) is keeping the belt warm for Stephanie Vaquer. As for Rollins, he's at least being presented as a focal point of Raw, but with a DQ already on his title defense ledger and Bron Breakker looming as the actual object of WWE's desire, we see what the ceiling for this run is.
All of that combines to create interesting concept that has been watered down by unimaginative execution.
That's also true for the promotions that have tried to replicate the Money in the Bank formula. Between 2007 and 2023, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling created "Feast or Fired", which answers the question "What if Money in the Bank was more convoluted and grim?". Aside from adding more briefcases (likely because Deal or No Deal was popular when this started), this improved nothing about the trope. In fact, using the "pink slip" as a way to legitimately fire people half of the time makes it worse.
Even All Elite Wrestling has dipped it's toe into this sinkhole, and like everyone else, succumbed to the same pile of gunk. Over the last two years, the winners of the Casino Gauntlet matches at All In have treated their prized title shot as a Money in the Bank contract, and it has led to some underwhelming creative choices.
The 2024 winner, Christian Cage, teased cashing in several times before finally doing so during the Revolution 2025 main event. Suffice to say, this was far from "the heist of the century", as Cage's cash in worsened an already-bad Adam Copeland vs. Jon Moxley main event.
That should've led to the end of AEW experimenting with this gimmick. Sadly, Tony Khan felt that teasing it for a second and third time would be the charm. It wasn't. Athena, the women's Casino Gauntlet winner, tried a couple of times to beat a weary Toni Storm for the AEW Women's World Championship, but apparently got tired of that and booked their title match for Forbidden Door, rendering those previous attempts as filler before ramping up the otherwise-solid build to the pay-per-view.
Maxwell Jacob Friedman's use of his contract at least made a little more sense. Being the cerebral, low-effort cad that he is, MJF tried to goad "Hangman" Adam Page into giving him a world title shot so that Friedman could use his Casino Gauntlet winnings as a backup in case he lost. Of course, this was a set up for Page to turn the tables and get Friedman to use the contract for Forbidden Door. This worked as a way for Page to call out MJF for his cowardice and reestablish the distinctions between the two young superstars.
Still, one solid bit of storytelling out of three doesn't make scripting WWE-lite angles that induce groans from your fanbase a worthwhile endeavor.
So, if WWE can't get the most out of these cash-ins and the imitation versions aren't much better, then why continue using it? Fittingly, money is the short answer. Money in the Bank has become a brand name event and concept for WWE, and simply removing it from the product doesn't seem sound business-wise. It also explains why other promotions keep attempting some version of it.
But all money isn't good money, and with every year of bad Money in the Bank booking that passes, it becomes less of a safe bet.