10 Times WWE Sacrificed WrestleMania For The Greater Good
9. The Longest Show On Earth (WrestleMania 35)
WrestleMania 35 was long. Too long.
While ‘Mania had stretched beyond seven hours in the past, this was a p*ss-take. If you were in the building before bell-time, you were probably at your seats for over eight hours, leaving you beyond exhausted by the time Becky Lynch, Charlotte Flair, and Ronda Rousey hit the ring for the main event. It didn’t help that the emotional high of Kofi Kingston’s WWE Championship victory went down halfway through the show, but no match was going to succeed in the show’s latter third. Fans were exhausted, spent, burned out, and already thinking about the journey home - which turned out to be a disaster in itself.
WWE had informed local transport companies that ‘Mania 35 would finish an hour earlier than it actually did. This meant limited trains departing the Meadowlands area as tens of thousands of fans poured out of MetLife Stadium, leaving an estimated 12,000 stranded in the pouring rain, forced to fork out hundreds of dollars for surging Uber rides. A complete and utter mess.
And yet WWE probably saw this a small price to pay to ensure that everything on the ‘Mania card got the time it deserved, and Lynch’s big coronation felt as big as it should have. Perhaps this was the case on tape; in person, ‘Mania 35 was a logistical nightmare.