This week’s edition of WWE Smackdown Live took place on July 4th, which meant a lot of the American audience probably wasn’t going to be sitting at home watching wrestling. The big tradition on the Fourth of July is to go out with the family and check out fireworks to celebrate the birth of America. How did that affect the Smackdown audience? The answer is: it wasn’t that bad at all.
The good news for WWE is that the Smackdown viewership numbers for the Fourth of July weren’t that bad. They got 2.33 million viewers for the show (thanks to WrestlingObserver.com for the info), which featured the return of John Cena after three months away. The number was only 11% less than the 2.6 million viewers from the June 26 show one week earlier.
The Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer said it was an “amazing number” for the Fourth of July. It also drew nearly one million more viewers than the next-highest rated show on cable on Tuesday night, which was Tucker Carlson’s show on FOX with 1.53 million viewers. When you can have a drop in viewers on a holiday night and still beat everything else on cable by 800,000 viewers on average … that’s a pretty good night for WWE.
A lot of the credit for the rating not being a total disaster should go to Cena. After all, WWE hyped Cena’s return for well over one month while noting that Cena was a free agent. That “free agent” business is key here, because WWE plans on utilizing Cena’s ability to draw ratings to help Raw do better numbers too.
It also helped that the main event of Smackdown featured a stacked battle royal with the remainder of Smackdown’s star power, including AJ Styles, who won the match. When you can deliver a main event with something on the line (Styles earned a shot at the U.S. Title), it’s better than sticking some random tag match out there.
WWE is likely pretty pleased with what they were able to accomplish this Independence Day.
