3 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Saturday Night's Main Event (Results & Review)

DOWNS…

4. WrestleMania Spot Pushes Chips In, Busts

Most of the wrestling world has already reacted to WWE’s WrestleMania 42 promotional spot that debuted online last week, but the ad getting play on Saturday Night’s Main Event after all that criticism warrants lodging a complaint here.

The ad – a supposed card game (though there were no cards present) between Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns, CM Punk, and Brock Lesnar – became notorious almost immediately for several reasons, and none of them good.

After a decade of pushing for a degree of parity for women’s wrestling, WWE chose to produce a commercial that featured only male wrestlers and talent, a horrible self-own for the company that only magnifies some of the attitudes and partnerships they’ve promoted during the past year-plus. The “boys club” ad ignores the reality that women are easily some of the most popular figures on WWE programming these days.

This was compounded by featuring Brock, who is named dozens of times in Janel Grant’s sex trafficking lawsuit against Vince McMahon and WWE. Bringing Lesnar back after a long absence was a poor-enough decision, but acting like he’s still a bankable, needle-moving figure in 2025 that you’d give someone so problematic such a prominent spot says all you need to know about the company’s current state of mind.

And of course, there’s Paul Levesque, front and center to narrate the ad, because what major promotional effort would be complete without the Dana White of WWE? (Hint: That’s not a compliment.) We get it, you created all of this and are responsible for WWE’s renaissance, but a word of caution: If you’re going to take credit for the rise, you’ve also got to be on the hot seat when things inevitably tumble back to Earth.

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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.