WrestleMania 39 review: McMahon looms on wrestling’s star-studded biggest night

polygon.com:

WrestleMania is probably the most famous event in the history of professional wrestling, and almost serves as a State of the Union address for the company that hosts it, World Wrestling Entertainment. It represents where the company, the most prominent business in its industry for the last few decades, is, and where it aims to go. And if Sunday night’s WrestleMania 39 is any indication, it aims to go much, much bigger and flashier, even if the ingredients that make it worth watching at all are right there doing their best in front of us.

Looming over the event from the onset is Vince McMahon, executive chairman of the WWE and its majority owner. In the early summer of 2022, he’d “retired” from the role amid a storm of controversy and an investigation into alleged hush-money payments he’d made. Then, in January 2023, he’d inserted himself back into the job, and revealed he’d signed a contract to lock him in for the next two years. McMahon, previously the final say in all creative decisions in the WWE, is said to have given his son-in-law and WWE chief content officer Paul Levesque (the retired grappler Triple H) the reins. But allowing another person to run his baby has never been McMahon’s style, and so rumors run rampant that he casts a large shadow in that regard, too.

Meanwhile, as the WWE seems to edge closer and closer to a potential buyer (CNBC recently reported UFC parent company Endeavor Group was close to a deal), increased attention is paid to a wider presence in pop culture. This year’s theme is WrestleMania Goes Hollywood (the second time it’s used that, having previously adopted the tagline in 2005’s Show of Shows), and there’s a cavalcade of the closest thing WWE can muster to star power. To name a few