How WWE became the biggest summer blockbuster of the year
A decade ago, when I started watching professional wrestling, I was taught two things with absolute certainty: The first was that Vince McMahon, the chairman and guiding creative force behind the world’s biggest wrestling company, was an out-of-touch, possibly psychopathic old man who was strangling the life out of the business. Second was that his son-in-law, 14-time WWE World Champion Paul “Triple H” Levesque, was going to save it.
Levesque is considered the mastermind behind WWE’s popular developmental brand, NXT, which has run concurrently with mainline WWE programming since 2012 and has consistently outshined its big sibling in the eyes of fans and professional wrestling pundits. Now, at last, Levesque’s time has come and the retired wrestler has the creative reins of the entire company, stepping in as chief content officer of WWE, unencumbered by his disgraced father-in-law. Fan enthusiasm is at a fever pitch and ticket sales are reaching record highs. There’s an air of rebirth, a palpable sense of joy and renewal in WWE’s recent programming, and the internet wrestling community — whose favorite pastime is complaining about the product — seems relatively satisfied.
Like everything else in pro wrestling, the idea that WWE has entered “a new era” is at least partially a “work,” part of the con in which the audience has agreed to participate. WWE is a company that has endured decades of well-deserved bad press while owned and operated by McMahon, a proudly predatory businessman who is currently under federal investigation for sex trafficking. (For an exhaustive account of McMahon’s life and many, many alleged misdeeds, check out the book Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America by Polygon contributor Abraham Josephine Riesman.) Now that McMahon is gone, presumably for good, it behooves the publicly traded company, which is now majority owned by media conglomerate Endeavor, to distance itself from its radioactive former chairman as much as possible.
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