Every Cinematic Wrestling Match Ever - Ranked!
Welcome to the "new normal".
In a way, WWE's use of cinematic-style wrestling matches is a lot like buses. You wait years for a genuinely good one, and then all of a sudden two crash through your living room wall on successive nights, and render you unable to speak for hours afterward.
As I say, in a way.
This new(ish) style of match is one that largely takes the action away from the ring and allows for cuts, retakes, visual effects, and other cinematic wizardry that's just not possible in front of a live crowd. While boiler room matches and even the Hollywood Backlot Brawl were all spiritual forerunners to this new genre, only very recently have wrestlers thrown the contests purely into the realms for filmmaking and, so far, to incredibly mixed results.
Speaking ahead of WrestleMania (but no doubt having seen the incredible features that would be contained within) Triple H spoke of WWE never getting "back to normal" after all this. "I don't think that's going to happen, I think that it will get back to some normalcy, but the new normal will be what is normal. It's not going to be what it was before. The opportunity of doing WrestleMania with these off-site shoots will open our eyes to different ways of doing things. Maybe it will change the product for the better in the long run."
That means we can expect a lot more of these contests in the coming years but, with them at the forefront of everyone's minds right now, let's examine their storied (and incredibly varied) history...