WrestleMania

WrestleMania is the flagship pay-per-view (PPV) and livestreamed event of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the world’s leading professional wrestling promotion and sports entertainment company. Since its debut in 1985, WrestleMania has been the premiere annual showcase of WWE’s colorful, high-energy brand of sports entertainment. Often referred to as “The Super Bowl of Sports Entertainment,” WrestleMania has grown over time to become the longest-running and most successful event of its kind in wrestling history. In addition to drawing an average of tens of thousands of live spectators for each event, each year WrestleMania is viewed by millions of people throughout the world watching from home. The event is also a popular attraction among celebrity guests, with such well-known figures as Muhammad Ali, Aretha Franklin, Donald Trump, Alice Cooper, and Ray Charles appearing at, and sometimes even participating in, various iterations of the event. Over time, WrestleMania festivities expanded to include several days’ worth of special events highlighted by the annual WWE Hall of Fame event and a rotating schedule of additional programming such as NXT TakeOver, a wrestling show that lasted from 2014 to 2021 and featured talent from WWE’s NXT developmental brand.

Background

WrestleMania has long been viewed as WWE’s top annual pay-per-view event. WWE itself is a wildly successful sports entertainment giant that has dominated the professional wrestling landscape for decades. The company’s historic roots date back to the establishment of a wrestling promotion known as Capitol Wrestling Corporation in 1953. Primarily controlled by successful wrestling promoter Vincent J. McMahon, Capitol Wrestling was a regional promotion that was part of a larger wrestling organization known as the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA). In 1963, McMahon and co-promoter Toots Mondt split off from the NWA and formed a new promotion initially called the World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF) and later simply the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). Over the next two decades, McMahon turned the WWF into a popular, successful wrestling promotion that boasted such stars as Bruno Sammartino, Superstar Billy Graham, and Bob Backlund. The company also realigned with the NWA in 1971.

The WWF in the 1980s experienced explosive, unprecedented growth. In 1982, McMahon’s son, Vincent K. McMahon, purchased the WWF and quickly aimed to take the company to new heights. Still a strictly regional promotion at the time of the sale, the younger McMahon planned to make the WWF a national, and eventually global, behemoth. After orchestrating another departure from the NWA the following year, McMahon began working to get WWF programming on television stations across the United States and gradually expanded the company’s reach. He also found a new headlining star in Hulk Hogan, a muscle-bound, bleached blonde superhero who soon became the most popular and recognizable professional wrestler in the world. By early 1985, the WWF had emerged as a major national wrestling promotion that was quickly outpacing its competition. With the inaugural WrestleMania event that March, the WWF officially became the most successful wrestling promotion in the United States. That success only multiplied in the years that followed, with the WWF moving into a growing number of global markets by the 1990s. At the same, the company’s runaway success ravaged much of the rest of the American wrestling industry, forcing many smaller promotions out of business and leaving almost no legitimate competitors standing. By the early twenty-first century, the WWF, which was rebranded as WWE in 2002 following a legal dispute with the World Wildlife Foundation, was an entirely unrivaled force in sports entertainment around the world.

Overview

The first WrestleMania was the culmination of Vincent K. McMahon’s early effort to transform the WWF into the United States’ premiere professional wrestling promotion. From the time he took ownership of the company in 1982, McMahon sought to move professional wrestling out of the smoke-filled halls and high school gyms, where it usually resided, and into the national spotlight. As part of that process, he established a fruitful relationship with cable television’s popular MTV network, which paved the way for a pair of WWF specials airing on the network in 1984 and 1985. Just as importantly, it also opened the door for a remarkably successful collaboration between the WWF and rising pop superstar Cyndi Lauper. With MTV and Lauper in the fold, the WWF soared to mainstream recognition. By 1985, McMahon was on the verge of becoming the undisputed king of professional wrestling. Solidifying the WWF’s stranglehold on wrestling required only one marquee event that would put the company over the top.

As the WWF rose to prominence in 1984, McMahon started planning an event unlike any other in the history of professional wrestling. He envisioned a wrestling super card that would not only feature the biggest names in wrestling at the time, but also an array of A-list celebrities who would draw a great deal of mainstream media attention. He also planned to air the event across the country via closed-circuit television. At this point, the event lacked only a name. This problem was solved by long-time WWF ring announcer Howard Finkel, who suggested that McMahon call it WrestleMania. With that, history was ready to be made.

The inaugural WrestleMania was held on March 31, 1985, at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The card was headlined by a tag team match that pitted WWF champion Hulk Hogan and A-Team star Mr. T against “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and “Mr. Wonderful” Paul Orndorff. Other wrestlers featured on the show included Junkyard Dog, The Iron Sheik, Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, and the legendary Andre the Giant. Numerous celebrity guests, such as Lauper, former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, New York Yankees legend Billy Martin, and piano virtuoso Liberace, also attended. Ultimately, WrestleMania was a massive success, drawing more than nineteen thousand live fans and an audience of more than one million people watching on closed-circuit television. By the end of the night, the WWF was cemented as the most dominant force in professional wrestling.

In the years that followed, WrestleMania became the WWE’s greatest annual tradition. Just two years after the original event, WrestleMania III drew a record-breaking crowd of approximately ninety-three thousand people to the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan to see Hulk Hogan battle Andre the Giant in the main event. The event remained one of the biggest draws for professional wrestling fans in the US in subsequent decades and helped create new generations of professional wrestling stars, with wrestlers such as John Cena, Trish Stratus, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Mark William Calaway ("The Undertaker"), and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson coming to prominence between the 1990s and 2010s.

Although Wrestlemania continued to be available through PPV, in 2014 the company also began livestreaming these in events; Wrestlemania XXX was the first major WWE event available for viewing in this format. Wrestlemania remained profitable and popular throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s; for example, 2016 Wrestlemania 32 grossed over $17 million, a record for the company, and initial reports placed the size of the crowd at nearly 102,000 people. However, McMahon later revealed that the size of the crowd had been inflated in the company's earlier reports.

History was made again in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the WWE to cancel its original plans for WrestleMania 36 and instead hold the event without fans at the WWE Performance Center in Orlando, Florida. Because the event lacked an in-person audience, some matches on the card were filmed in a more cinematic fashion—another first for WrestleMania, and a move that was generally well-received. Wrestlemania 37, held in Tampa, Florida, in April 2021, saw live crowds return to the event.

By that time some WWE stars, such as The Rock, had capitalized on their fame as professional wrestlers to branch out into other media. Still, many WWE stars who branched out into acting and other careers also remained involved in the WWE and continued to appear periodically at Wrestlemania events. For example, John Cena, one of the WWE's biggest stars of the 2000s, appeared in some capacity at every Wrestlemania event between 2002 and 2021 and continued to make guest appearances throughout the 2020s, including an April 2024 appearance at Wrestlemania XL, the fortieth annual Wrestlemania event. The Rock also appeared at Wrestlemania XL; by that time he had also joined the WWE's board of directors.

Wrestlemania and other WWE events continued throughout the early 2020s even amid internal disruptions and controversies at WWE. Perhaps most notably, McMahon, who had stepped down as the WWE's chairman and CEO in June 2022 only to return as the WWE's executive chairman in January 2023, faced criticism and controversy when he was accused of sex trafficking and sexual assault in a lawsuit filed by a former WWE employee in January 2024. That same month McMahon resigned as executive chairman of TKO Group Holdings, a company which had formed in September 2023 following the highly-publicized merger of the WWE and Zuffa, the parent company of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), one of the leading sports promotion companies focused on mixed martial arts (MMA) competitions.

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