2 Ups & 9 Downs From WWE Raw (March 29)

1. WrestleMania? What WrestleMania?

Drew McIntyre WrestleMania sign
WWE.com

If it weren’t for the giant sign that everyone points at during various points of Raw, it would be difficult to distinguish this PPV build to any other Sunday show.

Let’s not lose sight of things here: WrestleMania 37 is slated to be the first show to have a real, live audience for WWE in 13 months, with an estimated 25,000 fans each night. However, WWE had done next-to-nothing to sell Mania as a show worth plunking down hundreds or even thousands of dollars for tickets, expecting fans to just spend because it’s the first live show in a year – and it’s not working.

Less than two weeks until opening night, there are nearly 2,000 seats still unsold, and nearly half of them are on the floor, surrounding the ring. Those are the expensive seats, costing as much as $2,500 each – and there are still are hundreds of these seats still available 11 days before Mania.

And yet, WWE’s “hard sell” of their signature PPV, the first show with fans since March 2020, was this wet fart of a show. That is just utterly embarrassing. If there was any poetic justice, fans would just boycott the show, but we know this company succeeds in spite of itself. And that’s the real tragedy here.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.