If there’s one of thing WWE fans know about the company, it’s that they are always wanting to top themselves. There’s a lot of confidence there when it comes to running major events. Think of WrestleMania. Tickets go on sale every November, and they can probably sell 50,000 tickets in whatever NFL or college football sized stadium they choose (New Orleans next year) within the first month. The best part is they don’t even have to announce a match until three months after tickets go on sale, because the event sells itself.
According to a report from Pro Wrestling Sheet’s Ryan Satin, WWE is planning something big for next year in Australia. The company may be looking to run a pay-per-view event in Melbourne, Australia that would take place in a venue that can hold 100,000 people. The venue is called the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and if it happens, the target date for the event is October 2018.
The good news for those of us not in Australia is that WWE plans to broadcast this event on WWE Network as well, with Satin noting that while nothing is official yet, things are headed in the right direction.
Longtime fans may remember the Global Warning Tour, which resulted in WWE releasing a DVD from August 10, 2002. That show featured a main event of The Rock defending the WWE Championship against Brock Lesnar and Triple H. That event took place at the Colonial Stadium (now known as Docklands Stadium) in Melbourne, with a reported 56,734 people in attendance, and was just 15 days before a 25-year-old Lesnar beat The Rock for the WWE title at SummerSlam 2002.
Somewhat surprisingly, that show is not on WWE Network today. They do have the UK-only PPVs that they ran in the late 1990s into the early 2000s, but no sign of the Global Warming Tour show yet. Perhaps they will add it if this Australia tour becomes official.
An event like this would be huge for Australia, since they typically only get live events one or two tours per year. Getting 100,000 people to go to a PPV-like event does seems possible, especially if WWE advertises that it will be on WWE Network and they use Raw and Smackdown to build to some matches. It wouldn’t count as an official PPV event. Think of it as more of a bonus show.
A big factor with doing an Australia show is the time difference. If the show starts at 8 p.m. Melbourne time, that’s 4 a.m. on the East Coast, and 1 a.m. Pacific. For fans in the U.K., it would be a 9 a.m. start time. The good thing is that with WWE Network, you can watch on WWE Network at any time, and their Beast for the East special last year proved that fans will wake up early or stay up late to watch an event they’re interested in.
