10 Fascinating WWE SummerSlam 1996 Facts
1. It Had The Lowest Buys Of Any SummerSlam, Pre-WWE Network
The demons of 1995 had not yet been fully exorcised, and WWE was still trying to figure out how to counter the wallop that WCW was packing. Clearly, relegating the increasingly-popular Stone Cold Steve Austin to SummerSlam's pre-show match showed that they hadn't figured things out just yet.
SummerSlam 1996 ended up with just 157,000 buys. It was the only SummerSlam to do less than 200,000 buys prior to 2014, managing to top (bottom?) the hideously-low 205,000 buys from the previous year's event. That's a whopping 23 percent drop from 1995.
The 2014 and 2015 editions did 147,000 and 123,000 pay-per-view buys respectively, sparing SummerSlam 1996 the complete ignominy of being the least-bought SummerSlam ever. Still, it's pretty damning that in an era where a streaming service saves the consumer money on pay-per-views, the 2014 SummerSlam was still roughly 10,000 buys away from beating the 1996 show anyway.