WWE SmackDown Moving Back To 2 Hour Format (WWE News)

The Wrestling Observer Newsletter reports that WWE will soon revert back to a traditional 2-hour format for Friday night weekly SmackDown. Dave Meltzer noted that there's been serious discussion internally for a while about moving away from 2025's polarising 3-hour runtime in favour of the blue brand's more familiar scheduling.

Meltzer told readers that the 6 June episode has been pencilled in as a possible change, but he also noted that this "is not a hard date". That's just what company sources have been feeding the Observer chief recently - they also told Dave that "they expected it to be finalised this week".

Early June would give WWE some breathing space to make the change back to 2 hours, and it suggests that upcoming episodes have been largely fleshed out with the current 3-hour model in mind. However, it's worth saying that nobody outside WWE's walls can be 100% certain just how far in advance Hunter and his creative braintrust map core programming out.

In essence, Meltzer is taking some comments from internal sources and playing a guessing game, but SmackDown reverting back to a standard runtime has been on the cards for a while. In fact, according to Triple H himself earlier this year, it was always going to be the eventual plan following 2025's surprise third hour announcement.

SmackDown's 3-Hour Runtime Was Always Temporary

SmackDown went 3 hours starting with the 3 January 2025 edition. That was part of an agreement with the USA Network, and it brought the Friday night show in line with Monday Night Raw's souped-up length. Suddenly, WWE fans had no less than 6 hours of main roster television on their hands each and every week, at least on a temporary basis.

That's the key word; SmackDown was never envisioned as a long-term 3 hour broadcast. Unlike Raw, which moved to Netflix the same month, the blue brand was only beefed to theoretically add further weight to WWE's build towards WrestleMania 41. However, the jump from 2 to 3 proved polarising amongst fans.

Some have likely enjoyed having even more content to digest every week, but several 3-hour episodes of SmackDown have felt stretched and/or clunky. At times, it became obvious that WWE's writers struggled to fill time on the show. That's led to some alarming downtime between major matches/segments every other Friday, which seemed odd considering the hype surrounding 'Mania.

Select fans would breathe a sigh of relief if Triple H cut SmackDown's third hour soon. His creative team would almost certainly appreciate that too, because it'd represent one less hour for them to chew over weekly.

It'll be interesting to find out if Meltzer's predicted 6 June date rings true. Circle that on your calendars as a potential end to SmackDown's 3-hour experiment.