Rants

Wrestlemania VII

By Scott Keith on May 3, 2022

I just stumbled upon this article:

https://www.espn.com/wwe/story/_/id/22956778/wwe-story-wwe-attempt-fill-la-coliseum-wrestlemania-vii

By failing to sell even 15,000 advance tickets for an 100,000 person show, they were able to seemlessly downgrade to an arena show, and even spin it as a sellout. If they had failed even slightly less spectacularly, like 25K sold, they would have faced the nightmare choice of either running a huge stadium at a huge loss with huge Gulf War security concerns, or the PR disaster of arbitrarily canceling sold tickets for the show.

Can you think of another wrestling example where it's better to fail big than to fail small?


The WM7 situation was such an underrated “only in wrestling” situation that gets overshadowed by the fake bomb threat a lot. Like, yeah, what if they had to cancel 5000 tickets? It would have taken a minor PR disaster and sent it into a tailspin. At that point do you just run the cavernous stadium and fake it by desperately papering the shit out of the show? I don't have a good answer either.

For another example, I'd have to say Bill Watts' UWF. Crockett buying up the remains of Mid-South would have been a minor thing, but by trying to go national I think Bill at least secured some good deals for his talent by having a promotion that was a big deal.

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