I’m sure when you got done watching the marathon that was WrestleMania 34 you thought to yourself, “That wasn’t enough, I need more wrestling tonight.” From the pre-show kickoff to the sign-off with Roman Reigns covered in blood, this most recent WrestleMania took just about seven hours to complete.
The length of WrestleMania now, especially when considering there’s also NXT Takeover, Raw, Smackdown, and NXT tapings in days around it, is almost too much for wrestling fans to all consume. WWE asks a lot of its fans over Mania weekend and despite complaints from many that it’s overwhelming, it appears WrestleMania 35 might manage to go even longer, somehow.
Much has been made about WWE expanding all of its pay-per-view events this year by an hour, as they go to combined Raw and Smackdown events for each PPV rather than splitting them up. Adding an hour and starting at 7 p.m. ET makes some sense, given they have to spotlight both rosters. However, WrestleMania and the other “Big Four” events (SummerSlam, Royal Rumble, and Survivor Series) are already built to include both rosters, so one would think they would be immune to needing additional time.
That would apparently be wrong. According to The Wrestling Observer, via Sportskeeda, WWE will no longer be too concerned with trying to wrap up WrestleMania by midnight (or around there) anymore. Thanks to the WWE Network, they don’t have to worry about time slots when going over, which we’ve seen over and over on PPV events, but to consider they may plan on shows going well over in the future is fairly insane.
The optimistic view would be that an 8-hour WrestleMania would ensure every match gets ample time to showcase the wrestlers involved and tell a full story. But we all know that an extra hour probably means more skits, more Colonel Sanders and Snickers bits, and more musical interludes that the majority of fans would be happy without if the event just got done at a reasonable hour.
