Undertaker Standing Behind AJ Styles

Origin¶

The screenshot comes from WrestleMania 36, which aired on April 4, 2020 — the pandemic-era WrestleMania staged without a crowd. The match was the Boneyard Match between AJ Styles and The Undertaker, a cinematic, pre-taped brawl shot on location rather than in an arena.

Near the end, Styles believes he has finally buried his opponent. He stands over the grave, grinning, savoring it. Behind him, unseen, The Undertaker is standing there. The single frame — a man delighted with himself while doom looms directly over his shoulder — is the entire meme.

What it means / how it’s used¶

It is an object-labeling template for misplaced confidence. Styles gets labeled with an optimistic assumption; The Undertaker gets labeled with the thing about to destroy it. The joke depends on dramatic irony: the viewer can see what the labeled subject cannot.

The most common construction is temporal — a hopeful plan and the reality that will ruin it. It also works for:

• A person’s confidence versus a consequence they have forgotten.
• A short-term win versus the long-term cost.
• Anyone celebrating prematurely.

The template is unusually legible even to people who have never watched wrestling, because The Undertaker’s silhouette reads as generic menace. No knowledge of the storyline is required.

How it spread¶

The meme was made the same night the match aired. On April 4, 2020, a Twitter user posted an object-labeled version casting Styles as “2020 is gonna be my year” and The Undertaker as “2020” — a joke that landed with brutal timing three weeks into widespread pandemic lockdowns. That post took more than 1,000 likes and 375 retweets in under a week.

It scaled fast from there. By April 7, 2020, an Instagram version had more than 73,000 likes in under 24 hours, and through the following week the template saturated Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. The 2020 framing dominated early use, and the format became one of that year’s defining “things are about to get worse” images.

Its longevity is partly an accident of timing: a wrestling screenshot arrived at the exact moment the internet needed a picture of unwarranted optimism being ambushed.

Notable examples & variations¶

• The original “2020 is gonna be my year / 2020” construction and its endless yearly successors.
• Workplace versions: a completed task and the three new tasks it triggered.
• Student versions: finishing one deadline while another approaches unnoticed.
• Fandom edits labeling a character’s plan and the plot twist about to undo it.
• Crops of The Undertaker alone as a standalone looming-threat reaction image.

Legacy / cultural impact¶

WWE’s cinematic-match experiment during the empty-arena era produced a handful of enduring internet artifacts, and this is the most widely circulated. It also demonstrates a reliable rule of meme formation: the best “impending doom” templates are the ones where both figures are in a single frame and one of them is smiling.

The format is still redeployed every January, when the “this year is going to be my year” version resurfaces with the new digits swapped in — a small annual ritual that has kept a 2020 screenshot in rotation for years.