WrestleMania 40 has arrived. This year, WWE’s marquee premium live event emanates from the home of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, Lincoln Financial Field. But the “Showcase of the Immortals” — which has expanded to two nights in recent years — is not the only event in town.
Philly will see a celebration of sports entertainment from various promotions putting on shows for the influx of traveling wrestling die-hards. The Philadelphia Visitors Bureau expects WWE’s multi-day festivities alone to bring in over 200,000 wrestling fans to the City of Brotherly Love.
Larry Needle, the executive director of the Bureau’s Sports Division, told the Philadelphia Business Journal that even though Philadelphia bid on WrestleMania in the past, this was the right time for it to happen.
“The beauty of it for us all as a city is that now we’re going to get WrestleMania in all of its glory… if we did this even five or 10 years ago we would not have the benefit of the WrestleMania as it exists today,” Needle said.
Philadelphia is looking to top Los Angeles in terms of economic impact from the big event; WrestleMania 39 generated $215 million for the LA area, according to a study conducted by Applied Analysis. That topped the $206.5 million generated a year prior for WrestleMania 38 in Dallas. WrestleMania 39 drew nearly 162,000 people to SoFi Stadium with fans from all 50 states and over 60 different countries.
This time around fans took no time to set records. WWE touted WrestleMania 40 broke the company’s all-time gate record in one day, with 90,000 tickets selling in just hours of going on sale in August, surpassing the $21.6 million record set last year.
Straight Arrow News spoke to Brandon Thurston of WrestleNomics, the site that looks at the economics of the wrestling industry. Thurston said 50,000 tickets have been sold for each night of WrestleMania, the Super Bowl of sports entertainment.
“WrestleMania is the biggest wrestling event of the year,” Thurston said. “This is the 40th one. It started in 1985. It is the wrestling event that people will know best that is the peak wrestling event… it really started the notion that the entire country and entire world could be watching one wrestling event at one time.”
WWE is currently seeing record financial success, posting revenue of $1.3 billion in 2023, with a rise in attendance and TV ratings. This past week the company spotlighted a rise in the key advertising demo of 18- to 49-year-olds for its weekly programs of “Raw” and “Smackdown,” averaging 733,000 and 892,000 total viewers respectively in the demo for quarter one.
Thurston attributed that to what’s known in the business as “creative,” which means the storylines and characters. Right now there’s no bigger star in wrestling than the biggest star in Hollywood, The Rock, and his on-screen persona, nicknamed “the Final Boss,” is not shy about taking all the credit during his in-ring promos.
“What you’re feeling right now, you’re feeling the energy, you’re feeling the mana because right now professional wrestling is cool,” the former WWE champion told a packed crowd during a recent episode of “Raw.” “Right now the ratings have skyrocketed because of The Rock.”
“They’re getting more money,” Thurston said. “They’re becoming a more profitable company. It’s a flip from what the wrestling business used to be decades ago where it was largely a live event business and it’s really become a business where – we still sell tickets and that’s great to do, but more than ever it’s a media business.
“It’s selling some form of video – whether that’s television programs weekly, whether it’s these big events like WrestleMania that’ll go on Peacock. It’s selling lots of media and they want to do more sponsorships”
WWE has made several deals over the past year: merging with UFC to form the $21.4 billion company TKO, striking a $5 billion deal to send “Raw” to Netflix in 2025, switching “Smackdown” from Fox to the USA Network in October in a $1.4 billion deal; and something that WWE has never done before — selling advertising on its ring mat to Prime Hydration, a sports drink company founded by WWE superstar Logan Paul. The latter is the largest sponsorship deal in WWE history, according to The Wall Street Journal.
There has also been some bad news for the company in recent months. WWE founder Vince McMahon resigned as executive chairman after being accused of sexual misconduct by a former employee. He has denied the allegations. But while the case gave WWE negative headlines, Thurston said it didn’t affect fan engagement in the product. In fact, he said the WWE has benefited from McMahon being removed from the company.
“The popularity of WWE increasing over the last couple of years has a lot to do with Vince being more removed from creative than ever,” Thurston said. “There’s definitely a perception with fans that the product has improved and I think Vince was an impediment to WWE’s creative connecting with fans and making them feel like they were excited for the show and wanted to tune in, spending money and time towards WWE events. And Vince being removed from creative has allowed Paul Levesque and others to step in and produce a show that is more satisfying for more people and more people are excited about.”
Paul Levesque, better known to fans as wrestler-turned-executive Triple H, is now in charge of WWE’s creative direction and what stories are ahead for its biggest stars like Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins, Rhea Rhipley and Becky Lynch.
“On April 6 and April 7 in Philadelphia, we’re going to take you to a whole new level,” Levesque said at a WrestleMania press conference held in Las Vegas in February. “It is a new time. It is a new era and it is an all-new WWE. And I promise you this, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Thurston said while WWE may have had more mainstream buzz during the Hulkamania era of the 1980s or the edgy Attitude Era that featured Stone Cold Steve Austin of the late 1990s, this era, the TKO era, is the company’s most profitable.
“You can talk about the Attitude Era, yes, it was definitely more popular then,” Thurston said. “Hulkamania era, I would say yes, it was definitely more popular in terms of mainstream awareness and engagement, certainly. But the cable bubble declining and people cutting the cord from cable has caused this demand from TV networks toward their most popular programs which are still what’s keeping the declining cable TV business together. And [two] of the most popular programs on television, if you look at the ratings, [are] WWE “Raw” and “Smackdown.” So that’s what’s really helping them become more profitable than ever.
So who will reign supreme when the final bell rings at WrestleMania 40? Cody Rhodes finishing his story? Or Roman Reigns dominating as the head of the table? That remains to be seen.
But in terms of economic wins, all the numbers point to WWE and Philly, a city known for its storied history, making some more history at WrestleMania.
