On Thursday afternoon, WWE ambassador and creative team member Dana Warrior, tweeted a pro-LGBTQ+ pride message, stressing that she “believe[s] in equality, education, awareness, and this simple fact: love wins... Always!!” In and of themselves, the words would be fine, but because Warrior is best known as the widow…

It’s no secret that WWE programming feels stale at the moment. Very little is landing, live crowds for TV tapings have been noticeably more sedate, and new talent has reliably been squandered. When WWE’s new TV contracts start in October, the promotion will be competing with a new and well-funded rival in All Elite…

LAS VEGAS — All Elite Wrestling’s inaugural event on Saturday night at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas gave fans a lot to digest, but more importantly it delivered a well-balanced and suitably fulfilling feast. What was supposed to be a taste of what’s to come from AEW, both in the ring and outside of it,…

If you were a wrestling fan on May 23rd, 1999, you were probably doing one of three things. One of those was watching WWE’s latest pay-per-view event, Over the Edge. Another was using “scramblevision” to listen to that event by tuning a TV or VCR without a cable box to the pay-per-view channel. Some fans were probably…

Last Wednesday, All Elite Wrestling and WarnerMedia made a longstanding wrestling rumor official when they announced that the startup promotion’s flagship show will air weekly on TNT beginning this fall. No financial terms were revealed in the initial statement or at the upfronts, and neither was a specific time slot…

It’s real, and it’s spectacular.

As Luis Paez-Pumar noted here last Thursday, WWE is currently flailing its way through a ratings panic. Two weeks ago, Monday Night Raw did the lowest non-holiday ratings number in its history, posting an average of 2,158,000 viewers across the three-hour show; hour three was at 1,898,000 viewers. The promotion got…

On this week’s edition of WWE’s flagship television program, Monday Night Raw, viewers were treated to a segment in which the tag team The Usos, theoretically the good guys, revealed that they had invented “Ucy Hot,” their own sweat-activated version of Icy Hot, and secretly deployed it to the trunks of their rivals,…

When we last discussed Dean Ambrose in this space a few months ago, news had just broken that he had given WWE his 90-day notice and would not be renewing his contract. That Ambrose was parting with WWE was, at bottom, a sound business decision; with All Elite Wrestling and other promotions bidding for talent, Ambrose…

It’s a cross between a family value and a corporate one, but WWE is notorious for not settling lawsuits. They will when they have to, as in the fight over the rights to the gimmick of the Demolition tag team, but even then they dragged it out for just over a decade before finally making the call. They don’t settle…

CM Punk has been back in the news—or, anyway, back on wrestling websites— this past week for two separate and very different reasons. One of those is fueling giddy speculation about a potential comeback. The other is a bit more complicated.

On Tuesday, WWE wrestler Luke Harper tweeted a statement saying that he has requested his release from his contract. This was just a week after Sasha Banks, fresh off an abrupt end to her and Bayley’s storyline push as Women’s Tag Team Champions, reportedly asked for her own release from the promotion. On Monday Night…

WrestleMania week is invariably a dizzying experience, and the one that recently sprawled over the course of a full week in and around New York City was no exception. There were way too many shows this year spread across too many locations, and even sleeping in my own bed every night, not attending any WWE events (a…

It’s that time of year: Springtime, when casual wrestling fans return to the fold for WrestleMania and its many surrounding events. Perhaps this is happening to you, whether of your own volition or because you are being dragged into it by a friend or family member. If you’re rusty, this year’s overstuffed WrestleMania…

As exhausting as WrestleMania week can be, especially with fans gladly taking on the growing second-shift slate of late night shows, last year’s Mania week in New Orleans was one of the most manageable in recent memory. It was good, too, but the surprising thing was how user-friendly and accessible it all was. Mania…

There is just so much pro wrestling, spread over so many promotions and so many years. There is so much, in fact, that a great deal of it—not just forgettable Reagan-era bouts but legitimately legendary matches featuring iconic performers giving dazzling performances—is presumed lost. These matches might well be out…

Few relationships in professional wrestling’s history have been more bizarre than the long-running and extremely fraught one between The Ultimate Warrior and Vince McMahon and McMahon’s wrestling promotion. Over the course of decades, the relationship featured multiple splits and just as many lawsuits, WWE producing a…

The local television behemoth Sinclair Broadcast Group is infamous for its extreme right-wing politics and dedication to seeding those beliefs into its local news broadcasts. Ring of Honor, the wrestling promotion that Sinclair owns, has somehow avoided being stained by its parent company’s broader creepiness. The…

When WWE announces a new class of signees for its Performance Center in the Orlando area, the notable names tend to go public in advance. WWE infamously instructs its incoming talent not to tell anyone, but those wrestlers still have to finish up their independent dates before joining the promotion, and that kind of…

On Thursday, Jushin Thunder Liger, inarguably one of the most influential figures in the history of the global wrestling business, announced his retirement at a press conference in Japan. The 54-year-old masked wrestler, whose real name is Keichi Yamada, will travel the world on a farewell tour slated to end in…