The Disturbing Truth Behind WWE WrestleMania 38
"WWE is in trouble when the part-timers go away," and when is NOW.
If Survivor Series is "the one night per year when RAW and SmackDown go head-to-head" - it isn't - a suitable tagline for WrestleMania is "the one night per year that people actually give a sh*t about WWE".
A lot of people do give a sh*t about WWE, just to clarify. RAW and SmackDown routinely top the cable rankings. You can't tweet anything remotely positive about AEW nor anything mildly critical of WWE without the Fed defence squad making you question the invention of the internet. Ticket sales are uneven, and WWE has suffered diminished returns when returning to certain areas, but there's a prevailing feeling that, no matter how bad WWE gets - and it's really f*cking pointlessly bad in November 2021 - the audience is what it is. What it is is weirdly strong and not reflective of a panned product.
But the audience is ageing out. The median viewer age is 60+. The key demographic is stable, but hardly in a growth period. WWE badly needs to build towards the future, and the outlook is bleak, since you've read variations of that take for almost a full decade at this point. That isn't latent "bias" either; it's a recognised issue that WWE has targeted, quite hilariously, via the NXT 2.0 rebrand.
WWE just feels smaller in 2021.
You can hear it in the weird echo of the oversized arenas that WWE insists on booking to bask in the fake optics of the big time. You can sense it in the lack of online discourse, and if that's a take informed by a skewed timeline, it's reflected in Google trends. Year on year, WWE is a vanished presence in search engines. But every year, WWE has the ultimate trick: WrestleMania.
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