One of the drawbacks of trying to run a major show in a geographic location you don’t visit often is how early matches need to be announced. Because of this, the build to WWE Super Show-Down is looking a lot like movie prequels, where knowing the end makes the story less captivating.
Maybe it’s just me, but every time WWE announces a “new” match for Super Show-Down, I feel like it had been reported on months earlier. I don’t know if I’m just filling in the blanks based off of obvious decisions to be made, or if WWE announces matches on the down low before announcing them on Raw and SmackDown.
But this week on SmackDown Live, The Miz “announced” that he would face Daniel Bryan in Melbourne, with the winner getting a WWE Championship opportunity. You know, the match that WWE announced with a post on their website way back on August 21. Check the publish date in that link! Mere days after SummerSlam, this match was already official — yet a full pay per view cycle later, we have to act like this is something new.
As bad as that is, it’s not the worst offender. After all, The Miz has been feuding with Daniel Bryan for, oh, eight years. There was a story in place for the pair, and following the controversial ending to their SummerSlam match, it made sense for another singles match. The stipulation of a title match going to the winner is just a bonus.
No, the worst part of Super Show-Down’s booking is that matches have been announced with zero storyline logic, only to have the stories come later and inorganically. Take Ronda Rousey and the Bella Twins — back in August, it was announced (by WWE, no less) that the new Raw Women’s Champion would team with Nikki and Brie to face the Riott Squad.
Keep in mind: at this point, the Bellas hadn’t wrestled as a team for years, and besides showing up at SummerSlam to set up that rumored Nikki/Ronda match for Evolution, they had been mostly persona non grata. Since that announcement, the Bellas faced the Riott Squad in tag action, and this past week on Raw ran in to save Rousey from a three on one beating.
Shouldn’t the match announcement come after the visual presentation of a story to make it all seem logical?
Here’s another one: When Super Show-Down was announced, Kevin Owens was set to take on John Cena in a singles match. Since the initial announcement, that match has been changed to a tag match, pitting Cena and Bobby Lashley against Owens and Elias.
Cena has been absent from WWE programming since the Greatest Royal Rumble, but he’s had his fair share of dealings with both Owens and Elias over the past few years. But Lashley? There’s been no reason for him to team with Cena whatsoever.
As far as Lashley’s encounters with Elias and Owens, well, yeah, he’s been a thorn in Elias’s side since April. But until Owens attacked Lashley a few weeks ago, there was no real bad blood between them. (Sami Zayn’s feud with Lashley aside, since Owens never really followed up with that right away, so why should we care?)
WWE is not averse to putting a pair of singles feuds together to create a tag match, but those usually exist as either random television matches, or some kind of dark match that isn’t televised. Rarely if ever do two separate feuds get fused together into a tag match for a pay per view — and that’s what Super Show-Down is, in the WWE Network era.
This pattern of “announce a match, then book the angle leading to it” is like reading the last chapter of a book, finding out how everything ends, and then going back to read the rest of the book. You’ll always be waiting for something you know is coming to happen.
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It’s the same reason prequels rarely work well in a cinematic universe. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Star Wars. If an audience has seen Obi-Wan Kenobi in Episode IV, why would they think he was in true danger in Episodes I, II, and III? We knew Anakin would become Darth Vader, so the entire prequel trilogy was trying to put together pieces of a puzzle that was already assembled.
Knowing these matches had been announced over the summer, the WWE Universe has been watching Raw and SmackDown just waiting for all the pieces to come together. Ronda is teaming with the Bellas in October? Well, looks like we know what September will bring. It hurts the storytelling, because it seems too forced.
But with WWE only making rare trips to Australia, you need to give the audience a good show — and a reason to buy tickets. So the big guns come out, like a Triple H vs. Undertaker match that will never happen again (until it kind of does in November, probably, but shhhhhh — subscription required for link). And you need to announce the matches early on to get the fans to spend their money on tickets.
By announcing the matches in August, WWE ends up painting themselves into a corner. They need to have the long-term plan in place for the big event, but the short-term stories need to feed into that. With today’s viewing audiences having short attention spans, you can’t allow many stories to last longer than a month these days.
Therefore, it’s a few weeks after the match announcements that the picture comes into focus on television programming. For those of us who remember things, it makes the stories seem less interesting, because the end game is already set.