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As exhausting as WrestleMania Week may be, especially as fans embrace the growing list of late-night late-night shows, last year's Mania week in New Orleans was the one of the most successful. handy in recent memory. It was good too, but the most amazing was how easy and accessible everything was. Pilgrims from Mania staying in the French Quarter were one mile away from each WWE official event, the WrestleCon Fan Convention, and the many independent cards associated with it, as well as many independent events that were not part of it. ring, as well as all the others. Fun stuff that the French Quarter is otherwise famous for. Give or take a few taxis to get to the Ring of Honor and the remote hubs of the World Wrestling Network. Everything was perfect. WrestleMania Week has a lot of things, but it has rarely been so picturesque.
In any case, it was last year. The constellation of wrestling events in New York and surrounding areas this week around WrestleMania 35, to be held Sunday at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, could be the most stupidly expensive and breathtaking weekend in Mania . There are almost 50 wrestling cards on the books for the week, which take place almost all between Wednesday night and Saturday night. With WWE in the lead on Tuesday night SmackDown Live the recording, the WrestleMania weekend is now WrestleMania the week– seven days of overload.
This week's WrestleMania will feature at least four non-WWE hubs, as well as many other maps elsewhere. That's before taking into account non-wrestling attractions such as WrestleCon (in the same hotel as the affiliate cards this time), WWE Fan Axxess (which also offers its own cards to each change of position), rapper Wale's "Walemania" concert / evening, and various live performance and podcasts. These events extend over three boroughs of New York City and New Jersey, with maps in several counties. The guide to the various Voices of Wrestling programs seems to be the most complete, but it's a disconcerting reading, even though many of the major independent shows do not require advanced metro maneuvers. There are so many things.
If it sounds complicated, know that it is actually a lot more complicated than that once you have reached the level of soup of the alphabet, largely because of the last division between two larger events adjacent to Mania. The modern Mania weekend began to take shape in 2004, when Ring of Honor, the UK's highest independent promotion, staged a major exhibition in North Jersey to draw tourists to the city for WrestleMania XX and festivities associated with New York. ROH has attracted by far their biggest crowd of all time, establishing a clear project for the future. All this went to hell in 2009, after a change of direction that led a promotion of the Ring of Honor division, Dragon Gate USA, to start organizing its own Mania weekend shows. Things started to become competitive and never stopped.
Modern Mania Week only became a phenomenon in 2013. It was the year WrestleCon was created by Highspots, a wrestling product and video producer. The first year, WrestleCon was the usual autograph exhibition fare, but it coexisted with wrestling programs from the World Wildlife Network's parent company, the DGUSA, and others at the Meadowlands Expo Center. More deeply in New Jersey, the independent, independent Pro Wrestling Syndicate has organized its own convention / wrestling hybrids with curious mixes of big stars and independent talents. The crowds gathered for both, which proved the viability of the slots of Thursday and Friday. This would be useful in the future.
WWN and WrestleCon broke up in New Orleans in 2014, and have since been Mania's two largest independent hubs, running various promotions to fill large lists on their own venues. For many promoters, it is the week that puts them in the dark and gives them a visibility far beyond the norm. The same goes for talent, who can make their year with escape performances during the week and Bank enough money to take a weekend or two later in the year. Keith Lee was already an independent name in full swing two years ago, but being the ultimate player of the Mania weekend consensus in 2017 has really consolidated as a sought-after talent. he is now under WWE contract in their NXT brand.
The arrival in 2017 of Game Changer Wrestling's annual "Joey Janela's Spring Break" has really changed the game, at least in terms of the logistics of the week WrestleMania. After making its WWN debut, Spring Break was the most exciting weekend indie weekend show. All this buzz came to fruition when the second edition drew the biggest indie crowd of the 2018 festivities. Game Changer no longer needs WWN – Bloodsport, the second show in the promotion surpassed most other programs hosted on WWN this weekendLikewise, and with WWN more firmly than ever affiliated with WWE, it made sense for Game Changer to do its own thing. And they did, forming their own center, The Collective.
WWN had a good time before announcing that this year's events would take place at the usual venue in New York, La Boom, a nightclub in Woodside, Queens. They were not alone in their struggle to find a place, which owes a lot to Peak Mania's current overload condition, but also to a strange, site-specific twist: for a big city surrounded From a vast metropolitan area, New York is strangely lacking in medium-sized venues that big independent shows require. The most appropriate buildings, such as the Manhattan Hammerstein Ballroom, are prohibitively expensive, and the rest … well, Spring Break was originally categorized as taking place in a separate place from Collective events at White Eagle from Jersey City, but eventually it ended. at White Eagle too, with just a second added show and higher ticket prices to compensate for the inability to find a bigger and more suitable place. Spring Break being Spring Break and Peak Mania being Peak Mania, both shows have always sold out in four minutes each.
Collective events at White Eagle promise to be a unique blend of viral india – a total of four shows, all sold – from a selection of truly independent shows led by smaller presenters. The range includes a program of six other independent promotions as well as a multiprofessional showcase from IndependentWrestling.tv, which offers free tickets for general entrance to subscribers. Of course, there is some overlap, but the fan interest reflects how good the fight is to watch in NYC during Mania Week.
It turns out that Peak Mania may exist, both in terms of basic economics and elasticity of demand. WrestleCon has a reduced list of promotions and for a very practical reason: the ballroom they hold at the Midtown Hilton is the most expensive place on the weekend. As a result, only promotions that could reasonably be expected to be well shot are on the agenda, including WrestleCon's own Mark Hitchcock Memorial Supershow.
These notes have sold well, but elsewhere, the glut of supply is likely to outpace demand. With the exception of a sold-out show of Dramatic Dream Team, or DDT, one of Japan's leading comedians, WWN had a lot of trouble selling tickets even with a smaller site and at least one WWE name (Kyle O & # 39; Reilly of NXT) in the main event of their flagship brand. The House of Glory, based in Queens, has its own hub in its birthplace, Amazura Concert Hall, in Jamaica, Queens. World Wonder Ring Stardom, one of the best Japanese players, is about to succeed. But the other House of Glory shows at Amazura have barely sold, to the point that they raise questions about the wisdom of promotions making a Mania Week show just to say they did it. The Twitter account of one of these shows HOG, which features the UK's International Pro Wrestling, promotes a sale on the 50% discount general admission tickets, £ 10 each. In what is either a blooper or something darker, the site itself has currently listed them to £ 1.00 each. And yes, the coupon still works, which means that 65 cents will allow you to enter.
For better or for worse, there is much, much more. MLW offers television recordings on Thursdays and Fridays evenings, one of which includes a special live broadcast on BeIn Sports. There are LGBT-centric shows from Uncanny Attractions and Matter of Pride Wrestling. In addition to co-promoting the Impact, Wrestle Pro will host four more shows at Rahway Rec Center. Several other local promotions have specials. There was even a special evening on Wednesday night, the Pizza Party Wrestling. We have not even touched on the big issues.
WrestleMania is WrestleMania, and his merit is enough to anchor it all. But WWE also has matches at all of its events, and there's the Ring of Honor / New Japan Pro Wrestling Bonanza combined on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, which will be the first non-WWE professional wrestling show ever held in the MSG current and the first in a building bearing this name since 1960. At the risk of losing sight of this point, a lot of struggle. Some slots are stupidly overloaded, to the point that the laws of physics, much more than anything dealing with logistics or metro problems, will prevent fans from seeing everything they want to see. On Friday afternoons, Revolution Pro (the UK subsidiary of NJPW), Stardom and Black Label Pro all have strong cards. Thursday night has among others the WrestleCon Supershow, DDT and MLW.
This also has an impact on wrestlers and queues. MLW's contractual talents are almost all prevented from working elsewhere on Thursday or Friday afternoons or going to another show some evenings. Thanks to the early hours of calling to pre-record non-wrestling segments, they have too much to do, even though they are allowed to wrestle in independent shows in the late morning / early morning. ;afternoon. Wrestlers with more complex contract statuses, such as Penta el 0M and Rey Fenix, will work an early night in the MLW show and later in the WrestleCon show, and vice versa.
Other independent actors, like David Starr, are not bound by contracts. That means he'll end up running around the weekend, with matches in the top four centers. Even non-wrestlers are affected: Shimmer, an all-female promotion, takes place at WWN Friday at 11:00, but promoter / announcer Dave Prazak also calls Black Label Pro to the Collective at 3:30 pm. He will also bring a number of wrestlers from his show with him, as there is a significant overlap of female talent. There are many other examples, just as, if not more, exhausting. There's too much. The week is always great, and this one should be too, but if the pleasure of Mania Week is that it is full of good struggles, there is still too much to do.
David Bixenspan is a freelance writer from Brooklyn, NY, who co-hosts the Between The Sheets podcast every Monday at BetweenTheSheetsPod.com and anywhere else where podcasts are available. You can follow him on Twitter at @davidbix and see his portfolio at Clippings.me/davidbix.
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