Two-Night WrestleMania Is The Way To Go

Now that we’ve experienced a two-night WrestleMania due to the coronavirus pandemic, and by all accounts, it was a good show (borderline top 10, perhaps), it’s time to permanently make WrestleMania a two-night extravaganza.

Everybody loves WrestleMania, this much is indisputable. It is quite literally Christmas to wrestling fans. As Bill Murray remarked in Scrooged, “It’s Christmas Eve! It’s… it’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we… we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be. It’s a… miracle.”

Now, replace the word “Christmas Eve” with “WrestleMania.” It fits like a glove, doesn’t it?

Over the past few years (aside from WrestleMania 36), the show feels like a slog, with the run-time somehow continuing to snowball. The show could be littered with five-star matches and five-star feuds, yet my main takeaway is always this: this show is too fucking long. WrestleMania 35 clocked in at 7.5 hours, making it the longest pay-per-view the company has ever produced, pre-show included. Think about it; that’s longer than the average school day! If you started WrestleMania 35 as you’re eating breakfast in the morning, you could catch the bus, go to school, have lunch, have recess, come home and walk through the door just in time to catch Becky Lynch vs. Charlotte vs. Ronda Rousey.

Like I always say, too much of anything is bad for you. You can watch too much porn, eat too many cheeseburgers, and of course, watch too much wrestling in one sitting. And given the nature of WWE producing seven hours of live wrestling television every week, plus an additional two or three that goes straight to the network, there has to be the internal thought that people have the time to watch every minute every week, and that simply isn’t true. If they agreed with this, they wouldn’t produce Main Event, and Raw would be a two-hour show.

A more practical run-time for WrestleMania would be four hours, which is funny on a number of levels. For one, WrestleMania was a four-hour show for as long as I can remember. You know what else is a four-hour show? The Super Bowl, the event which WrestleMania is literally modeled after. Some even call it the Super Bowl of Sports-Entertainment. But how do you get back to the four-hour model? One solution would be to simply cut time, though this is not as practical as it seems. These days, WWE seems to operate under the notion that “everybody deserves a trophy and everybody should compete at WrestleMania.” It’s no longer treated as a privilege to earn a spot on the biggest show of the year – it’s a right. And perhaps that’s why many have become so disillusioned with the modern product.

Fan momentum for a two-night WrestleMania may have begun two or three years ago. The counter argument was always, “well, New Japan manages to make a long show seem short. Why can’t WWE?” Of course, that counter argument is no longer valid, as NJPW had its first ever two-night Wrestle Kingdom this year, which was met with positive reviews across the board.

To me, moving WrestleMania to two nights is the most practical solution. Of course, the show IS coming to Los Angeles next year, so there could be a hint of personal bias. But on paper, it makes a ton of sense from every angle. Yes, the operating costs would be immense. But so too would the revenue, because let’s face it, WWE could put on a WrestleMania for every day of the week and it would still sell out all seven days. Internal costs are a non-issue to me. Then there’s all the possibilities that could come with extending the show to two nights. The writing staff could put together two-day angles to incentivize people to tune in both days. Certainly, one way to play it would be like how NJPW did, where you can actually stack the WWE and Universal Championship matches on Night 1 and have the winners square off on night two to determine who the biggest superstar of the year really is. Another way to approach the concept is to treat the two nights as two entirely different shows. Hypothetically, if the show were in New York, or rather, “in the shadow of New York City,” as Michael Cole likes to remind us every single time WWE goes to New Jersey, Night 1 could take place at MSG while Night 2 takes place at MetLife Stadium. This is not at all unlike how WWE handled Raw’s 1,000th episode, where it booked two venues at once. That ended up being a bit of a disaster, but my plan involves two nights, not one.

As Mr. Six used to put it, “More flags, more fun!”

So how would a two-night WrestleMania go down, logistically? Well, I don’t think it’s feasible to run the event into Monday. After all, WWE has another important show to run, coincidentally in that same time slot. This would indicate that Saturday and Sunday will be the days to host WrestleMania while all other events get bumped up a day. This means NXT Takeover would occur on Friday and the WWE Hall of Fame would take place on Thursday. Of course, there could even be an argument to flip those two events, much in the same way it’s not always good to follow a hot feud with a hot feud.

It’s sort of like my relationship to Del Taco. Its steak & potato burrito is a vice much in the same way pro wrestling is. If I were to have one on Saturday and one on Sunday, it’s digestible to the point where I could pick one up again in a few days. However, eat two in one sitting, and both become a lot harder to keep down. As I said, too much of anything can be bad…

No matter how it’s laid out going forward, the evidence is widely available as to why WWE can and should make WrestleMania a two-day spectacle from now.