WrestleMania 42: How commercials, ads and excess took over WWE's biggest weekend
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Once again, this year's WrestleMania was a mixed affair — Night 1 was weaker than fruit drink in a retirement home, while Night 2 kicked like a mule. But throughout all the various ups and downs, there was one pretty consistent complaint from those who tuned in for the spectacle: What is it with all the commercials?
They weren't kidding on that front. Across WrestleMania 42 weekend, U.S. viewers got around one hour of commercials each night. In other words, around one-quarter of the entire run time for WrestleMania 42 was taken up by content trying to sell you something.
First, there were the plugs for other WWE products like the merch store. Second, there were the WWE commercial partnerships, including Drew McIntyre and Tiffany Stratton plugging an online gambling platform. And then there were the third-party commercials, with everyone from Wayfair to the World Cup getting in on the action.
You can see why fans could feel aggrieved. And if that's you, then rest assured, it's not in your head — there never used to be that many commercials during WrestleMania. And we can prove it.
The TKO effect
As a comparison, I sat down with a stopwatch and counted the amount of time taken up by ads in three previous WrestleManias: ‘Mania 22 (20 years ago), ‘Mania 32 (10 years ago) and ‘Mania 38 (2022, and thus the last one before WWE was placed up for sale prior to the TKO merger).
At 'Mania 32, I counted 3 mins and 49 seconds of ads, and at 'Mania 38 there were 6 minutes and 10 seconds. For 'Mania 22, there were none at all.
(To clarify, that is actual commercials we're talking about — not just a brand's logo being shown on the replay screens or Michael Cole mentioning Snickers, but the whole broadcast cutting away to a commercial.)
Without wanting to be too rose-tinted about the old days, there was something almost something quaint about the commercials that did appear. These were the days when it was still novel to see WWE wrestlers — Ha, look, it's The Miz! — popping up in ads for Cricket or similar. Not so much now.
How do you get from that — the equivalent of around one minute every hour being used by commercials — to the current ratio, where you have five minutes of ads between some matches?
That's the TKO effect I guess.
To demonstrate how bad the problem has gotten, just look at the various movie commercials and trailers from this year's WrestleMania 42 weekend. Add them up and they come to 10 minutes on their own. That's longer than several of WrestleMania championship matches, including Trick Williams vs. Sami Zayn, Becky Lynch vs. AJ Lee and Liv Morgan vs. Stephanie Vaquer.
Not just ads
While I had my trusty stopwatch, there was another gripe I was keen to probe: The length of the entrances. By now, we've all become familiar with the accusation that WWE's bigger shows in particular are massively padded out by elongated entrances. But is it true?
Again, this weekend's show had form on this front: By my count, there were 1 hour and 42 minutes' worth of entrances across the two nights, accounting for around one-fifth of the entire weekend's runtime. (That's slightly less than some counts I've seen elsewhere — my guess is they also included Alicia Taylor's in-ring announcements.)
As for whether that's significantly more than previous years, it depends on your starting point. If you just look at the overall percentage of the broadcast taken up by entrances, not that much has changed at all.
By my calculations, around 20% of the runtime of this weekend's shows was taken up by entrances. That's actually marginally less than four years ago (21%) and not that different at all from the older two shows. In 2006, entrances still took up 18% of running time.
Then again, that doesn't tell the full story. For a start, we know there are significantly fewer matches than there used to be. If entrances are still eating up at 20% of runtime, then individual entrances must have gotten longer.
Indeed, that's exactly what the data shows. The average WrestleMania entrance has increased by one-third in the past decade. Each entrance now takes an average of three and a half minutes.
Of course, there's the obvious caveat that not all entrances are alike. I suspect few fans were grumbling when "Stone Cold" Steve Austin was taking five minutes to get to the ring after his stadium-rousing return at 'Mania 38, for example. Or when Finn Balor made his extra theatrical entrance on Sunday as "The Demon."
But when the longer entrances just involve Randy Orton or Stephanie Vaquer meandering to the ring in what's essentially just an elongated version of their weekly television entrance … you can see why fans would be frustrated at that, even if they still appreciate the match that comes afterward.
What about the wrestling?
The bigger problem I can see from the numbers is the overarching one that squats over everything: There's just less wrestling in the modern PLEs.
The the amount of broadcast time taken up by actual wrestling matches this year for WrestleMania 42 was just 34%. That's down from 43% four years ago, and 51% back in the 2000s.
Where has that time gone?
The aforementioned commercials have taken a chunk. But so has everything else. The longer Hall of Fame segments; the celebrity cutaways; the recaps of Night 1; the legends coming back to announce attendance numbers — all of that takes time. And WWE isn't taking it from the entrances.
"It's all part of the show," as a certain Chief Content Officer might say. And maybe that's true — would it really be WrestleMania without a bit of pageantry?
At the same time, the numbers don't lie. The percentage of this show taken up by ads and entrances is only getting bigger — and the wrestling itself is the main loser.
