WrestleMania: Has The Grandest Stage of All Gotten Too Big?
By Bryan Heaton
WrestleMania 31
Main Card Length: 3 hours, 59 minutes, 28 seconds
Total Bell to Bell Action, Main Card: 1 hours, 38 minutes, 46 seconds
“Wasted” Time: 2 hours, 20 minutes, 42 seconds
Average Match Length: 14 minutes, 5 seconds
For a WrestleMania generally regarded as one of the better shows in recent memory, this is by far the most wasteful of all. Nearly 60% of the event was spent on things outside of wrestling – 58.8%, to be exact. The show ran for just shy of four hours, but featured only 98 minutes of competition between the ropes. The original Ghostbusters movie from 1984 is 105 minutes, for comparison. A pair of musical performances will do that, though.
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The trouble with this one really boils down to trying to wait out the daylight. Airing a live show on the West Coast of the United States meant a 4 p.m. local start. In the spring, the sun doesn’t set until roughly 7-7:30 – closer to the end of the show. How do you do an Undertaker entrance in broad daylight?
The entrances also ate up a lot of time in this show. Sting made his long-awaited WWE debut against Triple H, who channeled the Terminator franchise for his admittedly cool, but way too long entrance. The extracurriculars in that match – DX and the nWo getting involved – also stretched out the affair.
There wasn’t a single match on the card that lasted more than 20 minutes, even though the 14 minute average match duration is pretty much the standard for this time period. What also contributed to the “wasted” time, though, was the surprise appearance by The Rock and his introduction of Ronda Rousey to confront Triple H and Stephanie McMahon.
WrestleMania 31 was the last of the four hour main card events, as the standard has been five hours for the past two years – and will be again for WrestleMania 34 this year.