WWE has addressed the status of WrestleMania and its related events set for Tampa, Florida with the flagship event moving to the WWE Performance Center and will be closed to the public.
“In coordination with local partners and government officials, WrestleMania and all related events in Tampa Bay will not take place. However, WrestleMania will still stream live on Sunday, April 5 at 7 pm ET on WWE Network and be available on pay-per-view. Only essential personnel will be on the closed set at WWE’s training facility in Orlando, Florida to produce WrestleMania.”
Won’t be watching and am cancelling the network ASAP. I usually only subscribe from Rumble to Mania but I can’t imagine sitting through an eight hour show without an audience.
Utterly ridiculous decision that I hope backfires on them big time
I’m supposed to be mad at them for giving us a show when there’s a complete lack of live events happening right now?
It’s unfortunate that the biggest event of the year is happening in a flawed way, but it’s 7 hours I won’t have to be thinking about a virus or being stuck at home indefinitely, so I thank them for that, no matter what benefit they’re seeing from it.
Wow. This seems madness. Smackdown was horrendous last week, unless Raw is better WrestleMania is going to feel like a joke. Such a shame after such a good build
A lot can still change in two weeks. There could be more quarantines like San Francisco which essentially shut down the city, domestic travels bans limiting talent from attending and more that could still make it impossible for Wrestlemania to proceed.
I’m honestly more upset that the same will probably happen with TakeOver when the WM TakeOver is typically the best show of the year.
I’m still for WWE just shutting down for two months and coming back in a big way.
Honesty how many more Raw/smackdown/nxt tapings can they have without coronavirus spreading to the wrestlers? This is so fucking stupid and irresponsible.
I think they fear fans tuning out of their habit watching RAW and Smackdown to go away for 2 months. I also think they are in a difficult spot story wise where they have been building stories with a specific end date in mind. For which the options are
1.) continue the stories on TV until mania in a stadium can take place.
2.) Go away, play best of shows, and hope fans still care about the stories when they come back.
3.) Put on an empty arena show and finish the stories and move on
4.) go away and start new stories and trash what they are doing now.
5.) finish the stories on TV on taped shows.
I would lean toward 5. Like tape Mania, then have each show during the week play a build up video package, and the taped match or 2. I think a 7 hour empty arena show is going to drag.
So in an effort to be productive, here’s an idea even though I have no idea how viable it is-
They only have about 200-300 seats in the Performance Center. They should find about 100 monitors/televisions for any of the seats that are against the hard camera side, set up a Facetime to play on said monitor, and pay an appearance fee to a bunch of wrestlers and promoters who were supposed to appear for shows that weekend who are now at a loss, and have them watch and just react as fans usually would, with sound, to whats happening live in front of them in the ring on the screens.
Would it be perfect? No. Would it at least give us some sound? Yup. Would it help out a bunch of people who are missing out on the biggest paydays of their year? Definitely.
That said…even if it can be done, it seems like a big investment of capital to get done when WWE themselves are probably out millions upon millions here. Though maybe the good PR gets them some of the people who would have signed up for other wrestling OTTs that week to join the network to make up for it.
If mania ain’t happening at all 90 percent will cancel the network
only money you losing is the gate
at a time when Disney plus is adding Frozen 2 (effectively killing digital and dvd sales of said movie) in hopes of getting people to sign up for everyone self quarantine and people are looking for things pass the time you can get network subs up at least they hope.
BTW they have the rare occasion to play with pre-tapes on segments like the one with Taker, to be more “supernatural” or whatnot. And they did the same old jack s#$t that looked even stupider without a crowd.
Watching the Raw highlights from last night I have to say, I have huge respect for these performers.
This can’t be easy at all and they must even feel a bit silly but they are doing their best to put on a show.
I guess the problem with delaying is how long do you delay for?
It could be as long as January before you can have more then 50-100 people in attendance so they may as well make the best of it and see what the show can be like.
I see people saying they shouldn’t be performing at all but TBF football teams are still training together, people are still working in the UK, so a skeleton staff being together to perform isnt the most ridiculous thing but that could change by the time Wrestlemania is due to air.