Possible New WWE Pay Per View Schedule Leaks
Of course take this with a big bag of salt but there’s a chance that this is legit. Click on the picture for a better image.
The first thing I think is SWEET GOODNESS THAT’S A LOT OF SHOWS and that’s going to be the take away from this schedule. You’re looking at basically two shows a month with two or three weeks between them. I can go with that if they cut some of the times down but a lot of people are going to get burned out in a hurry if they’re running a three hour (potentially plus if Money in the Bank is the first of its kind) show with an hour pre-show. I can watch wrestling all day every day but even I think that’s a lot.
Now for the good: WAY better names. Stuff like Backlash, No Mercy and Clash of the Champions are improvements over a lot of the goofy names we have to put up with so often. It’s also going to be nice if the wrestlers are allowed to have some more time but the worst thing they could do is the old formula of making so many matches filler. I’m talking about airing stuff like Mordecai vs. Hardcore Holly on pay per view. Fans aren’t going to put up with that and it could get old in a hurry.
It might help a lot if some of these shows are two hours instead of three. Look at Money in the Bank. You could have cut off at least two matches (meaning keep them on the pre-show where they were scheduled in the first place) and trimmed the thing down a bit. If you’re paying the same price for it on the Network (I’m aware some people are going to get it on regular pay per view still), it’s ok to trim off some of the fat and let the shows actually work for a change.
It’s too early to tell but I’m skeptical about this. Knowing WWE, whose new philosophy seems to be CRAM AS MUCH AS YOU CAN IN, I’m worried about what we might be going through with them burning through everything they can as fast as they can.
With lots of quantity you can pick and choose what to watch and when to watch it…..if it is too much for you, then don’t watch it all….simple solution for all the naysayers out there.
That would go back to the standard WWE mantra:
“You want to watch a lot of WWE? Well screw you!”
I just don’t understand why they started pushing quantity over quality over the past 15 years. They’ve been increasing the quantity over and over while the quality keeps going down. Sure we get good matches at ppv’s and the odd episode of Raw when someone is given some time but… eh
Money. Lots of money.
They actually set a record for revenue (not income) last year.
This won’t make more money unless intrest goes up read: it won’t.
Also that isn’t true. Revune and ratings are down by quite a bit this year.
If history is any indication. This is going to cost more than it makes until it’s mercy killed.
They made over $600 million (around $658 million) in revenue (no other year comes within $100 million of that). Beating the record from 2014, which beat 2013’s record. Revenue has increased every year since 2009.
I’m not sure what you’re basing their revenue on from this year compared to last. Ratings are very different from revenue. The low ratings have an enormous amount of factors outside of the quality of the shows.
They will make money off sponsors, ads, live gate, etc. So yeah, it’s money.
The money stays if crowds stay consistent. Adding more dates leads to burnout to the home audience. Live audience gates are down. The arenas have not been full. Stock is down. But hey I’m sure that six hundred million is gonna look great in five years when it’s two.
They set records in live event and TV event revenue (as well as other things) in 2015. They can charge more for PPVs tickets than live events and get more sponsor money. They don’t need full arenas for this to be profitable. Remember PPVs are $10 due to the Network, hard to burnout the home audience for something that is $120 per year.
I don’t think this will work incredibly long term but short term it should be very profitable. Once it stops working, they can easily just cut it.
It’s half way through the year and there’s still 9 of these things left? Good ol WWE and the over saturated ways and here I was hoping the brand extension would help take care of that.
Sidebar: Hardcore Holly wrestled Brock for the title on PPV. 2004 was such a strange year.
Yeah there are some weird PPV matches in the brand spilt era. You have a mind boggling amount of PPV debut squashes( something NXT somehow gets away with) and some weak title contenders when depth dipped. However you get fun cool things Kidman v London in a cruiserweight match at No Mercy 04 or 05? Just a tag partner spilt that was really well done because they pushed an actual story.
Well to be fair, he did Break Holly’s neck. Easy build for that. Plus it was the Rumble, so it didn’t need a big title match to sell it.
Holly didn’t sandbag him. Holly said he doesn’t know why people think he did that or why people think he would even be capable of sandbagging a guy with the strength of Lesnar.
Looked to me like he sandbagged him, and Holly’s a known asshole so I wouldn’t be surprised. But Rumble or not, Hardcore Holly challenging for a world title on PPV shows the limited depth.
I’m fine with it as a one time thing because of the injury. It didn’t main event and they had bigger things going on.
It only went 6 minutes or so on the Royal Rumble and wasn’t the selling point of the Show. I think it was fine for what it was and that was pretty much the blowoff to that angle anyway.
I see no reason to really complain about this because they are all on the WWE Network and we don’t have to pay $40-45 for them anymore.
The reason to complain is that it won’t solve the companies problems. You can never solve quality with quantity.
My main concerns are the lack of depth for brand specific pay per views, and also the fact that they’ll be producing 8+ hours of content over three nights on PPV weekends. That’s a whole lot of wrestling.
Here’s a thought: WWE are creating as much programming as possible so fans don’t have time to check out any other promotion.
Possibly but I’ve never bought into WWE’s paranoia. They’ll openly mention ROH and NJPW but won’t ever say TNA (save for the Austin/AJ podcast) which really isn’t on those other promotion’s level.
I hear what you’re saying and they are definitely more open now to acknowledging other promotions (HHH influence?). i’v never really thought of it as paranoia, just an effective business practice.
But it isn’t. All it does is increase the chance of burnout.
That’s a lot of clutter. I prefered the last format where each show essentially got 4-5 brand specific ppvs. I could see this working too it’s just so much more difficult to pull off.
If you look at the PPVs by brand it’s not that bad.
I’m actually looking forward to the brand split.
This business is gonna kill me before I can make a profit.
I’m hoping that was an early concept (due to the Las Vegas arena not having its actual name) and not the current plan.
I’m still concerned about what they are going to do with 3 hours of Raw. Adding more PPVs is adding to my concern.