Story by reporter Miquel Ortiz.
If you haven’t noticed lately, you may have seen the massive influx of clips and moments from World Wrestling Entertainment, commonly known as WWE, on your social feeds. Their recent resurgence into the mainstream world of entertainment went through various controversies involving its former CEO, to a corporate merger with the UFC, to now where celebrities like Travis Scott are getting involved in major storylines with their superstars like John Cena.
But how did they get here, and what was the catalyst for their recent “Renaissance Era,” as they like to describe it? As WWE gets ready for its biggest show of the year, WrestleMania 41 in Las Vegas, let’s look back at the events which led up to the recent resurgence of World Wrestling Entertainment.
The story takes us back to March of 2022. This was during the time where Vince McMahon, who was at the time WWE Chairman and CEO, was being investigated for alleged misconduct against former paralegal Janel Grant. WWE’s flagship show Monday Night Raw was airing on the USA Network and was receiving some of its lowest ratings in the show’s history.
Meanwhile its competition such as All Elite Wrestling’s Wednesday Night Dynamite was consistently gaining viewership and eating into WWE’s numbers on a year over year basis according to Wrestlenomic’s TV Ratings charts. Not only was their TV ratings falling, but their live attendance figures at the time were falling as well according to a Forbes article on the subject.
After Vince’s departure from his role as CEO in July of 2022, Paul “Triple H” Levesque would informally take over the role as head of creative until he was officially given the role as part of his promotion to “Chief Content Officer” in September of 2022. After which ratings would see an increase across multiple quarters.
The next major move would be to secure a streaming deal for their flagship show, and in January of 2024, they would get it in the form of a 10-year deal with Netflix where Monday Night Raw would be exclusive to the platform along with WWE’s entire library being available on the service for international users.
The Netflix debut would happen on January 6th of 2025 emanating from the Intuit Dome to a sold-out, attendance record setting crowd, where according to a press release by Netflix 2.6 million U.S. households would watch the debut live on the service. By comparison, RAW’s last episode on the USA Network only received 1.596 million viewers.
They would not just see an increase in live attendance and live viewing figures, they would also see an increase in social media impressions. For example, the full segment of John Cena, Travis Scott, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson attacking current WWE Champion Cody Rhodes at this year’s Elimination Chamber event garnered 6.7 Million YouTube views as of the writing of this piece.
Despite the crushing lows the product and the company itself suffered at the early start of this decade, it seems WWE branding itself as going through a “Renaissance Era” is apt as more and more people are talking about how good the product is and how excited they are for what’s to come with Paul “Triple H” Levesque now fully at the helm.
